NOV 18 1RJU 



GOD AND BREAD 



WITH OTHEE SEEMONS 



BY 



MARVIN R. VINCENT, D.D. 



PASTOR OF THE CHURCH OF THE COVENANT, NEW YORK 



n ft 




NEW YORK 
DODD, MEAD, AND COMPANY 

1884 



or coHO»«»» I 

lwA8«IHOTOW 



Copyright, 1884, 
By DODD, MEAD, & COMPANY. 



ELECTROTYPED AND PRINTED 

BY RAND, AVERY, AND COMPANY, 

BOSTON. 



&ije Congregation of tfje glutei) of t{)e (Eofanant 

Cfjts Volume, 

Pobltsfjeo at &fjeir Eeqimst, 

Eg &ffecttonateig Enscrtfoo 

38g ^Tfjeir Pastor. 



CONTENTS. 



PAGB 

I. God and Beead 3 

II. Does it Pay? 21 

III. The Single Need 39 

IV. Facing God 59 

V. Light and Loyalty 77 

VI. The Obdebed Steps 97 

VII. Fidelity and Dominion 115 

VEIL Extea Seevice 135 

IX. The Pelde of Care 153 

X. The Plough and the Kingdom . . 173 

XI. Joy and Judgment . . . - . . . 189 

XII. Silent befoee God 207 

XIII. A Lepee's Logic .227 

XIV. Pbayee and Panoply . . . . 247 
XV. The Daysman 265 

XVI. The Lesson of Eipeness .... 285 

XVII. Steength, Victoey, and Knowledge ln 

Youth 305 

XVLLI. God and the Times of Ignoeance . . 323 

XIX. The Peomise of Incompleteness . . 343 

XX. Only a Little. While .... 363 

v 



GOD AND BREAD. 



L 

GOD AND BREAD. 

" But he answered and said, It is written, Man shall not live 
by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of God." —Matt. iv. 4. 

HOW shall we live ? Multitudes of people are 
asking that question to-day with peculiar 
earnestness. The man who could give a satisfac- 
tory practical answer would be regarded as the 
greatest of all public benefactors. 

But why do not men go to the Bible for an an- 
swer ? For one reason : because many of them, at 
least, assume that the Bible has little or nothing to 
do with their every-day affairs. It does very well 
to preach from, to read sometimes on Sundays, to 
furnish fine sentiments and apt quotations ; but in 
the pushing, open-eyed world of business, in the 
atmosphere of capital, stocks, bonds, business-com- 
binations, panics, it is as much out of place as a 
fifth-century hermit would be on Wall Street. 

Then, again, if they do chance to consult the 
Bible, they find such astonishing answers, so utter- 
ly at variance with the principles by which they 
have been accustomed to live, that they quickly 
shut the book, saying, " Fanciful ! Impracticable ! " 



4 GOD AND BREAD. 

This text, for instance, offers an answer to the 
question, " How shall we live ? " It strikes out, in 
a sentence, a theory of living. How generally that 
theory has been accepted we can see for ourselves 
without looking very far. It has stood on record 
all these centuries: yet the cry, "How shall we 
live ? " is as clamorous as ever; and the great mass 
of society is living by quite a different, indeed, an 
opposite, theory. 

To understand Christ's theory as here pro- 
pounded, we must examine briefly the story of 
Christ's temptation, with which it is connected. 

After having fasted for forty days, our Lord was 
visited by the great tempter of mankind. He was 
weakened by hunger ; and his hunger may have 
been aggravated, as has been suggested, by the 
very appearance of the stones which strewed the 
ground, and which in that region have the shape 
of little loaves of bread. Satan began his assault 
by urging Jesus to use his divine power in chan- 
ging these stones into actual loaves, and thus to 
appease his hunger. It was a very plausible temp- 
tation. "Here thou art, the Son of God, the 
powers of heaven at thy command. Why shouldst 
thou suffer from a vulgar, human need ? It should 
be no hard thing for thee to make a loaf out of a 
stone. If thou be the Son of God, command that 
these stones be made bread." 

Now, this temptation was aimed at Jesus as an 
individual, and as the head and representative of a 
kingdom. Addressed to Christ as an individual, 
it was intended to make him commit himself to the 



GOD AND BREAD. 5 

admission that his life could be sustained only by 
external and visible means. If Christ had yielded, 
he would have said, in so doing, " Bread is indispen- 
sable to the support of life. I can live only as I 
shall have bread. I shall perish if I do not have it." 

But suppose the tempter had quoted Scripture, 
as he did a little later, and had cited the story of 
the manna in the wilderness, and had clinched that 
with those verses of the seventy-eighth Psalm: " He 
rained down manna upon them to eat, and had 
given them of the corn of heaven. Man did eat 
angels' food : he sent them meat to the full." 
Suppose he had said, " As the Son of God, do you 
profess to be more scrupulous than God himself 9 
He wrought a miracle for his hungry children : why 
should you hesitate to do the same for yourself?" 

Our Lord's answer included this very case, and 
was pointed directly at it ; since his words are a 
quotation of Moses' words to the Israelites in his 
review of their history. God's intent in the mi- 
raculous giving of the manna — a new, special thing, 
created for the special need — was to show the 
people that their life depended directly upon him, 
and not upon ordinary means of support. Cut off, 
as they were, from their accustomed food, they 
should, nevertheless, be fed, and drink abundantly, 
through God's special bounty. They should not 
starve because the wilderness did not furnish the 
products of the Nile valley, not even if it were 
utterly barren. There was a purpose in God's 
giving them an unfamiliar article of food, and in 
giving it through unfamiliar channels. Their own 



6 GOD AND BREAD. 

exertions had nothing to do with their subsistence, 
beyond gathering each day's supply at their tent- 
doors. The nature of the supply left no room for 
them to boast of their own enterprise or prudence 
in their journey through the desert. Hence Moses 
says, " He humbled thee, and suffered thee to hun- 
ger, and fed thee with manna, which thou knewest 
not, neither did thy fathers know; that he might 
make thee know that man doth not live by bread 
only, but by every word that proceedeth out of the 
mouth of the Lord doth man live." 1 

Here, then, the two theories of living are square- 
ly confronted. Satan, as the prince of this world, 
announces his, and tries to win Christ's assent to 
it: "Man lives by bread, and by bread alone" 
Christ replies: "Man lives not by bread, but by 
God." Man lives by God's gifts, only as God is 
behind them. Man's real support is not in the 
gifts, but in the Giver. 

What is covered by this word " bread " 9 
It covers the whole visible economy of life, — all 
that range of supplies, helps, and supports upon 
which men usually depend to keep themselves 
alive, and to make life comfortable and enjoyable. 
It covers the whole economy of food and drink, 
clothing, shelter, ministry to the senses, to power, 
respectability, and worldly honor. The world's 
commonly accepted theory is, By these things we 
live. We cannot get on without them. Do you need 
to be told how widely that theory prevails in soci- 

J Deut. viii. 3. 



GOD AND BREAD. 7 

ety to-day ? For what are the mass of men spend- 
ing their energies ? For food and raiment and 
position, — for the abundance and superfluity of 
these things. Not for shelter merely, but for costly 
homes. Not for competency merely, but for wealth, 
and vast wealth ; the plain inference being, " We 
cannot have too much of such things : a man's 
life does consist in the abundance of the things 
which he possesses." 

Now, I am not blind to men's natural and par- 
donable anxiety about such things. Food and rai- 
ment and home are parts of God 's own economy of 
life in this world ; and Christ himself says, " Your 
heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all 
these things/' But I am speaking of the false 
position in which men put these things, — of their 
tendency to separate them from God, and to seek 
to live by them alone. While Christ says, " Your 
Father knoweth that ye have need of these," he 
forbids men to hold them alone or first in their 
thought. Something is to take precedence of the 
gifts, and that is the Giver. The gifts are to be 
sought through the Giver. Men often seek food 
and raiment without reference to God, and often 
in ways forbidden by God : whereas Christ says, 
" Seek God first, seek to be under his rule, seek 
to be right according to his law, and the food and 
raiment will come with these." The kingdom of 
God includes bread; and hence, in the Lord's 
Prayer, immediately after the petition, " Thy king- 
dom come, Thy will be done," comes the prayer for 
daily bread. 



8 GOD AND BREAD. 

Man lives by God, in direct dependence on God. 
God may use, and does commonly use, natural 
means for man's support; but God is not limited 
to these. Men think he is. When these means dis- 
appear, they think all is over. But they forget that 
these things derive all their power to sustain and 
to delight from God. It is God alone that gives 
any value or efficiency to these. Men say that 
the secret of life is to be in right relations to the 
world. God says, "You are in right relation to 
nothing until you are right with me. You are 
nothing at all, — not so much as that red leaf 
driven by the wind, which lies now over a gold- 
mine, and now on the roof of a hovel; nothing, 
save as I uphold you, and send you your food, 
and give it power to nourish you, and to please 
your palate. Dainties are no better than chaff if 
I do not impart their quality. Let me withdraw 
my hand, and see what they will do for you." 

The very structure of the body asserts that man 
was intended to eat and drink. The earth was 
commanded by God to bring forth fruit for the ser- 
vice of man. The facts of heat and cold and tem- 
pest suggest clothing and shelter. If man lives in a 
spiritual economy, he also lives in a natural econ- 
omy, to which he is plainly adapted by his Creator, 
and which is as plainly adapted to meet his condi- 
tions. But Nature everywhere points beyond her- 
self. The nature of man points up to God. If 
that is first which is natural, it is only first in 
order of succession, not of importance. If the physi- 
cal life of the babe precedes the intellectual and 



GOD AND BREAD. \) 

moral life of the strong man, the intellectual and 
moral life is none the less the higher stage of be- 
ing. If God so arranges the physical life of man 
that it is sustained ordinarily by food, it is that the 
physical life should suggest the higher life of the 
soul, and the bread the Giver of the bread. Why, 
in ordinary matters men recognize this principle 
clearly enough, that, ultimately, the great forces 
on which they depend for the common transactions 
of life are not material. A cable despatch comes to 
you across the Atlantic. You know that it passed 
over a wire ; you know that it was borne by an 
electric current; but you also know that neither 
wire nor current nor telegraphic key is of any 
avail until a human mind brings them into com- 
bination. The cable will not carry messages of 
itself. You do not for a moment think that iron 
and fire and water only carry you over the rails 
from New York to San Francisco. Mind and will 
must adjust and apply these agents. No more will 
bread avail without God. Behind all this physical 
economy, to which bread is the visible minister, are 
the divine Mind and Will, creating and adjusting 
the human organism and its minister alike. Every 
thing depends on that divine Mind and Will. 

And in proof of this, God has now and then put 
men in places where the physical ministry failed, 
and has shown them, that, if need were, he could 
sustain their life without it. Moses was with him 
on the summit of that barren mountain for forty 
days, nourished by no mortal food. Elijah trav- 
elled in the strength of a single meal for forty 



10 GOD AND BREAD. 

days. God has only to say u Live," and man lives, 
and continues to live whether there is bread or 
not. Says Jeremy Taylor, "If the flesh-pots be 
removed, He can alter the appetite ; and when our 
stock is spent, He can also lessen the necessity : 
or, if that continues, He can drown the sense of 
it in a deluge of patience and resignation. ,, And 
Wesley writes, — 

" Man doth not live by bread alone : 
Whate'er thou wilt, can feed. 
Thy power converts the bread to stone, 
And turns the stone to bread. 

Thou art our food : we taste thee now. 

In thee we move and breathe. 
Our bodies' only life art thou, 

And all beside is death." 

But I have said, that Christ appeared in this 
temptation as the head and representative of a 
kingdom : whatever rule or policy he might adopt 
for himself would give the law for his followers. 

If, then, our Lord had yielded to this first 
temptation, he would have committed himself to 
the bread-theory as the law of his kingdom, no 
less than of his own life. He would have said, 
by changing the stones into bread, " As /cannot 
live without bread, so my kingdom cannot thrive 
so long as men's worldly needs are unsupplied. 
My administration must be a turning of stones 
into bread. It must make men happy by at once 
miraculously removing all want and suffering from 
the world, and inaugurating an era of worldly 
prosperity." 



GOD AND BREAD. 11 

We know that this has not been Christ's policy. 
He abjured it in this answer to Satan. He did, 
indeed, mean that a time should come when the 
wilderness and the solitary place should be glad ; 
but that was to be the result of holiness, of the 
subjection of society to a King, the girdle of whose 
loins should be righteousness. This is what Christ 
asserts, that society, no less than man as an indi- 
vidual, truly lives only as it lives by dependence 
on God. Social prosperity is based on righteous- 
ness. It would be possible to test the matter on 
a small scale. Suppose that a man of immense 
wealth and grand administrative power should 
have a little town of a thousand people given to 
him in charge, with absolute authority to rule it, 
and to develop its resources in his own way. Sup- 
pose the man to say, " Yes, I will make this people 
as happy as a community can be. I will build 
comfortable homes for those who are poor. I will 
give each of these poor families a competence. I 
will educate all these ignorant ones. Poverty and 
squalor shall disappear. The sanitary arrange- 
ments shall be perfect. There shall be no foul 
pools to breed miasma. There shall be pure water 
and good ventilation." If the plan embraced 
nothing more, the man, however in earnest and 
philanthropic, would be doing precisely what the 
Devil wanted Christ to do. He would have the 
power — which to those poor people would be as 
good as miraculous — of changing bodily misery 
to comfort, stones to bread. His theory would be 
the bread-theory, prosperity through the supply 



12 GOD AND BREAD. 

of physical need. Do you think that would be a 
happy community ? Do you think that a society 
which should recognize God nowhere would be 
a peaceful, well-ordered body? Do you think 
that good homes and good food and ventilation 
would keep out passion and greed, or do away 
with depraved appetites ? No. Culture would 
only refine selfishness. Competency would furnish 
greater power for mischief. Natural differences 
of talent and energy would assert themselves, and 
call out the envy which attaches to such differ- 
ences. The members of that community, in short, 
would be no happier with bread, and without God, 
than they were without either God or bread, and 
would be infinitely more dangerous. The bread- 
theory is the radical weakness of communism, in 
that it contemplates only the adjustment of out- 
ward conditions and the satisfaction of natural 
appetites. There must be, as we all know, a mate- 
rial basis in society, just as there must be an 
underground foundation for a palace. That is not 
first which is spiritual ; but when you look down 
into an excavation, and see great foundations laid, 
you say, "A house is to be built here. That 
foundation means a house, or it means nothing." 
So, if civilization is only a matter of material 
forces, of steam and electricity, of telephones and 
sewing-machines, of drainage and ventilation ; nay, 
if it add to these, taste and culture, libraries and 
art-galleries, and leave out God and conscience, 
and faith and worship, — it is only a foundation, 
daily emphasizing the lack of its superstructure. 



GOD AND BREAD. 13 

Civilization, without God and righteousness, is 
mere cellarage. The community which lives by 
bread, without God, does not truly live. 

History repeats itself. In these modern days 
one finds himself rummaging the pages of Gibbon 
and Tacitus and Juvenal. Look at those old 
empires which lived by bread alone ; by riches so 
enormous that it seems as if God had determined 
to give money a chance to do its best ; living by 
power so vast that there were no more worlds to 
conquer; living by pleasure so prodigal and so 
refined and varied that the liveliest invention 
was exhausted, and the keenest appetite surfeited. 
Babylon, Rome, Antioch, Alexandria, Carthage, — 
to-day you dare not open to your children the 
records of the inner life of these communities. 
You almost hesitate to read its fearful summary in 
the first chapter of Paul's Epistle to the Romans. 

And what of ourselves? what of this nine- 
teenth-century civilization in America, to go no 
farther ? What is our measure of progress ? Has 
this civilization advanced in the measure in which 
it has woven rich stuffs, carved statues, painted 
pictures, wrought cunningly in gold and ivory, 
and written with grace and power? Other and 
earlier centuries have these to show as well as we. 
In many of these things we still take our lessons 
from them. No, truly. When the civilizations 
of the world sent their representative products to 
Philadelphia, the true key and test of that vast 
exhibition of human achievement were in one little 
case — where the word of God, translated into the 



14 GOD AND BREAD. 

various tongues of the earth, was spread before 
the spectator. Just so far as the principles of 
that book are behind and beneath the material 
display, does it mark a real progress. The nation, 
like the man, lives truly, only as it lives by God, 
and not by bread alone. I look back to the barren 
mountain of the temptation. I see, rising before 
the eyes of the weak and exhausted Son of man, 
the vision of the kingdoms of this world and their 
glory, vested with the witching glamour of satanic 
sorcery. I hear the stupendous offer of the whole 
mass of the kingdoms which know not God, with 
all their pomp of art and learning, of fleets and 
armies, all on the simple condition of accepting 
the law of life by bread instead of life by God. 
And that picture is lifted up to-day, amid the 
crazy rush of the exchange and the crash of fall- 
ing fortunes, as a silent reminder that the world's 
great pattern of life chose life by God, — though 
there went with it the desert, and Gethsemane, 
and the cross, and the long, sad centuries of the 
growth of righteousness, — rather than life by 
bread, with its quick and superficial triumphs, and 
the gilded glory of Satan's kingdom. Through all 
time, until the kingdom of God shall have fully 
come, his voice will make itself heard, above the 
roar of traffic and the whirl of dissipation, — 
" Thou shalt worship the Lord thy God, and him 
only shalt thou serve." 

And suppose bread fails. Suppose the body 
literally starves, and the man dies, as we say. 
Is Christ's theory disproved? By no means. 



GOD AND BREAD 15 

Christ's choice led him to the cross, and many a 
follower of his has been forced to choose between 
the bread-theory and death. When God says that 
man shall live by his word, he means by " life " 
far more than the little span of human years, with 
their eating arid drinking and pleasure and gain- 
getting. This utterance of the world's Redeemer 
assumes the fact of immortality. If not, the 
theory of life by God is branded; and there is 
nothing for us but the bread-theory : " Let us eat 
and drink; for to-morrow we die." To live by 
the word of God is to share the eternal life of 
God. The bread-life is but the prelude and faint 
type of this. It gets all its real meaning and 
value from this. Human life is nothing if it does 
not foreshadow the larger life of eternity: and 
when the lower physical life fails for lack of 
bread, the man does not cease to live; he only 
begins to live, and to prove that if man cannot 
live by bread alone, he can live by God alone. 

Here, then, we have Christ's theory of life, in- 
dividual and social. Man lives by God's gifts, but 
not by the gifts only. By bread, but not by bread 
alone. Bread is nothing without God. Bread gets 
all its power to feed from God. Bread points 
away from itself to God. Bread has a part in the 
divine economy of society ; but it comes in with 
the kingdom of God, under its law, and not as its 
substitute. 

In such disturbances as those of the past week, 
it is well that men take heed lest their anxiety 
should throw them upon Satan's bread-theory, and 



16 GOD AND BREAD. 

divert them from the counter theory of life by 
God. We cannot, being human, be entirely free 
from care. At any rate, we are not. But this we 
can do, by God s help : we can keep it constantly 
before us, that our life, after all, is not in these 
material things. The loss of the material gift does 
not carry with it the loss of the divine Giver. 
The man who lives by bread alone has nothing 
when bread is gone. He may run down the whole 
line of his reserves, and find nothing which is be- 
yond the possibility of disaster. But you who live 
by God, when you reach back to what lies behind 
bread, find the best of your treasure, which moth 
and rust cannot corrupt, nor thieves break through 
and steal. Face the question to-day ; it is a good 
time, in the presence of these hard tests. What 
is my theory of life ? Is it Christ, or Satan ? Is 
it bread alone, or bread with God ? Ask yourself, 
" Where is my heart fixed most of the time ? Is 
it on God, as my life ? or is it on my stocks and 
securities and ventures ? " And, ere you answer 
the question, call up the words of your Lord and 
Saviour, " Where your treasure is, there will your 
heart be also." The practical working of the two 
theories is written down in lines which he that runs, 
may read. Before you is the picture of the Man 
of Sorrows, who had not where to lay his head,, 
reviled and spoken against, walking by his hard 
road to the garden and to the cross, and yet delib- 
erately choosing to live by God rather than by 
bread; and you see the choice vindicated by the 
peace and poise of that life, by the enthusiasm of 



GOD AND BREAD. 17 

its faith, by its heavenly joy in its work, by its 
ever-growing power over the life of the world, by 
the adoration and love and praise daily wafted 
towards it from millions of souls : and all this 
while the worldly dominion he refused has proved 
a vanished shadow, while the old empires have 
gone down in ruin, and their pleasures have turned 
to a corruption which is an offence in the world's 
nostrils. The old city which rang with the cry of 
" Bread and the Circus ! " is only a monument now. 
The tourist wanders over the Palatine, and peers 
down into the choked vaults of the Csesars' pal- 
aces ; and the antiquarian rummages where Nero's 
fish-ponds gleamed, and climbs along the broken 
tiers of the Coliseum, from which the culture and 
beauty and fashion of Rome looked down with 
delight upon Christian martyrs in the fangs of 
tigers. 

As you look on this picture, surely you will take 
fresh heart; surely you will win a new faith in 
Christ's theory ; surely you will not dare, with the 
glory of that life before you, to take the baser the- 
ory of the prince of this world, to choose the life 
which is by bread alone ! You have seen more 
than one man who lived by bread alone find his the- 
ory of life fail. You have seen him, when bread 
failed, go down, down, heart-broken, dishonored, 
ruined, reputation gone, conscience stained, honor 
blighted, manhood wrecked, nothing left ; but you 
never saw, and you never will see, such a catastro- 
phe befall a man who lived by God. When the 
silver and the gold are gone, he has the God who 



18 GOD AND BREAD. 

holds the treasures of the earth in his hand. He 
has manhood untainted, his best self untouched, 
and round him the strong arm of Him who says, 
" Cast all thy care on me. I will never leave thee, 
nor forsake thee." 



II. 

DOES IT PAY? 



II. 

DOES IT PAY ? 

" For what shall a man be profited, if he shall gain the whole 
world, and forfeit his life ? or what shall a man give in exchange 
for his life ? " — Matt. xvi. 26. 

"/COMMONPLACE is contemptible," is the ver- 
V^ diet of modern culture. Not of modern cul- 
ture only : the Athenians, we are told, were equally 
impatient of it, and spent their time in nothing 
else but either to hear or to tell some new thing. 
But is this a true verdict? Stone pavements, for 
instance, are very commonplace to us; so much 
so, that we have ceased to be conscious of them, 
and walk or ride over them all day long without 
a thought of what we are treading on. When the 
street is torn up, when we come to a muddy gap 
in our accustomed track, we wake up to the fact, 
that, in a city, stone pavements count for a good 
deal. Nobody takes notice of lamp-posts; they 
are very commonplace : but let the lights go out 
all over the city, and we begin to find out how 
large a part they play in our convenience and 
safety. The fact is, that the best things in our 
lives are the commonplace and familiar things, — 
the senses, health, home, reading, and writing. It 

21 



22 DOES IT PAY? 

is often the highest praise of a thing that it has 
become commonplace. A thing which has no 
value does not pass into common use. The best 
thing that can be said of bread is, that everybody 
uses it. 

So of texts of Scripture. Certain texts carry a 
flavor of novelty, while others are household words. 
Our text to-day is one of these latter. I suppose 
every preacher in Christendom has preached upon 
it some time or other. It is more than doubtful 
if any thing new can be said about it; and yet 
that is the best reason for preaching about it : for 
this text is to Christianity just what the solid 
ground is to our business and building, just what 
bread is to our living. It is a shaft that opens 
down into the very heart and centre of the gospel, 
and branches off under the whole Bible. No 
reader or preacher of the Bible can escape the 
truth it tells. He must run against it if he reads 
the Bible at all. 

What, then, is the truth ? It takes the form of 
a question of value, — a question which, in some 
shape, interests us all. It is thrown into the set- 
ting of the market-place. All life is a bid for 
something, — that something, whatever it be, which 
each of us calls his end or object in life. That 
something we want; and for it we are willing to 
pay a price, — our labor, our pains, our best 
thought, our temporary rest and comfort some- 
times. I seem to see the great market in the 
fresh morning. The young, vigorous forms, and 
the bright, eager faces are pouring in at the gate. 



DOES IT PAY? 23 

There is one thing up at auction, though there 
seem to be many. It is the world. Here one 
cries up honors ! — literary, military, civic honors, 
— praise of men, nattering of crowds, flaming par- 
agraphs in the newspapers ; social honors, — hom- 
age to beauty, society at your feet. Here is a rival 
vender. Pleasures ! what infinite variety ! appeals 
to every sense, suited to all tastes ; coarser wares 
for the coarser grained, and subtler enjoyments for 
the aesthetic ; pleasures of meat and drink, pleas- 
ures of luxurious ease, pleasures of artistic study ; 
the wildest excitements, the most delicious lan- 
guors; pleasures of color and of sound and of 
perfume, — all going, going cheap ! In another 
corner, wealth ! close beside it, power ! The world 
is on sale. Do monks and puritans tell us it is a 
" fleeting show " ? Ha ! it is a good world, full of 
good things. And the silks and jewels rustle and 
sparkle, and the banners wave, and the trumpets 
sound, and the gold chinks, and the sweet odors 
rise in rich steams, and the air is laden with sweet 
harmonies, and glowing with lovely hues. A good 
world, and going so cheap too ! something within 
the reach of everybody : who will buy ? Do you 
wonder that young eyes grow brighter, and young 
cheeks flush, and young hearts beat quicker? So 
much for youth, especially. Why, the world is for 
youth. Hope, love, pleasure, — they are all for 
youth. I seem to see, in the midst of that eager 
throng, one who appears far more interested in 
the buyers than in the wares. With a wonderful 
blending of majesty, affection, and sadness, he 



24 DOES IT PAY? 

scans the young traders as they crowd round the 
booths. And now I see him lay a hand — a hand 
with a strange mark on it — upon the shoulder of 
an eager youth, who is crowding forward, and bid- 
ding high and eagerly ; and, as the youth turns im- 
patiently, he gazes into his face with a look which 
seems to go down to the deepest secret of his heart, 
with a love which disarms resentment, and says, 
" Wait a little. There is time enough to buy here. 
One question only: that thing which you want, 
and for which you have just bidden so much, what 
shall it profit you ? " 

I have only thrown into a kind of allegory what 
is actually going on. I have merely used a fancy 
to carry a fact. I want you to see and feel the 
fact, if you will, the fact that the world is bidding 
for your homage, your allegiance, your love, your 
energy. It is a fact that the world appeals to you 
to accept its rules, its customs, its modes of think- 
ing, its ends of living. It is a fact that the Lord 
Christ says to every one of you, "Suppose you 
get it. Suppose you make it all yours, all the 
kingdoms of the world and the glory of them, — 
what good is it going to do you ? You are about 
making a bargain : of course you want to make a 
profitable one. Well, what shall it profit you if 
you gain the whole world, and lose your own 
life?" 

Notice, then, what our Lord tells you in this text. 
First, that your choice of a principle and end of 
living involves an exchange. You get nothing in 
life, good or bad, without cost. You know very 



DOES IT PAY? 25 

well, that, if you are to succeed in business, you 
will do it at the cost of leisure and ease and 
amusement. You must work when you would 
rather rest. You must stay in the hot, dusty city, 
when you would rather be among the cool hills, 
or down by the breezy sea. If you would suc- 
ceed in medicine, you must conquer your natural 
repugnance to disgusting sights and odors. If 
in literature, you must shut yourself up with 
books, and toil while others sleep. No man ever 
leaped into a success of any kind without cost to 
himself. Success is always paid for with some 
coin or other. Do you expect you will win moral 
success, spiritual victory, on any other terms? 
Is this grandest and highest of successes going to 
be poured into your lap as a free gift, for nothing ? 
Secondly, look then, at the nature of exchange 
in this particular case. What do you pay, suppos- 
ing you buy the world ? You have passed many a 
shop in cities, in the window of which you nave 
read, "price fixed." The vender would have you 
know that you need not try to beat him down. 
He will take so much, and no less. If you want 
the article, take it at that price : if -you do not care 
to pay that price, let it alone. That exactly rep- 
resents the case here. If you buy the world, you 
pay a definite price for it, a price from which there 
is no discount to the most favored buyer ; and that 
price is your life. You see our Lord is not merely 
putting a supposed case, a bare possibility, as if 
it might possibly happen that a man should do 
so monstrous a thing as to lose his life for the 



26 DOES IT PAY? 

sake of the world : he states it as a principle, a 
universal fact, that the man who takes the world 
takes it at the price of his life. For you will notice 
that the text is only the conclusion of the state- 
ment in the previous verses, about which there 
cannot be any doubt. " Suppose a man wants to 
come after me," says our Lord. " He pays for the 
privilege this price ; namely, that he denies self, and 
takes up the cross. Suppose a man wants to keep 
his life, his worldly, selfish, lower life ; to live for 
self, as we say ; to keep his pleasures, his pursuits, 
his studies, under the economy of this world. He 
can do it. He can save that life, but only at the 
expense of his real life, his better, Christlike self, 
which Christ stands ready to develop in him. He 
that would save his life shall lose it." If the neat, 
smooth, wheat-corn should say, " This form of life 
is good enough for me : I prefer to remain as I am. 
I do not like going into the dark earth, and part- 
ing with my identity," all that could be answered 
would be, " Very well. Remain as you are ; only, 
the price of your remaining is the forfeiture of that 
higher, more beautiful form of life, — the bearded 
stalk with its multiplied grains." The higher life 
is at the expense of the lower. " Except a corn of 
wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth 
alone." If it bring forth fruit, if it would save 
the lovelier, richer life, it must lose the other form 
of life. If a man wants his shoulder free of the 
cross, he can have it so ; only, he forfeits what- 
ever good comes of being Christ's disciple. The 
two things exclude each other. You cannot have 



DOES IT PAY? 27 

Christ and self too ; you cannot follow Christ, and 
be crossless ; you cannot live partly in the higher, 
and partly in the lower, life : you must choose be- 
tween them ; and, whichever you choose, you pay 
for it with the other. 

Here, then, is Christ's fixed price, — Your life 
for the world. He states it to you here: he 
hears you bid for the world, and he asks you, 
"What then? Is it a good purchase? If so, you 
ought to be able to tell why." You pay what 
seems to me an extravagant price for a piece of 
land, and yet there may really be no extravagance 
about it. You may have special reasons for desir- 
ing that situation, — reasons which make it more 
valuable to you than it could be to any other man ; 
only you can surely give those reasons. You can 
surely show that you are getting your money's 
worth. So Christ says to you, " You pay your life 
for the world. It is a high price, but doubtless 
you can give a reason for paying it. How shall 
you be profited if you gain the world and lose your 
life?" 

Will it not be well to stop, and examine the value 
of this purchase before the bargain is concluded ? 
And please to note, that, in what I shall have to say 
about it, I shall appeal mostly to your own observa- 
tion and experience. I shall go into no guesses 
nor speculations. But let me first say, that you 
may be none the less a purchaser of the world if 
you do not go to the length of our Saviour's sup- 
position, and gain the whole world. You need not 
be rich nor powerful nor luxurious to be worldly, 



28 DOES IT PAY? 

and to exchange your life for the world. You may 
be as ignorant and as rude in your life as a Hot- 
tentot, and as poor as Lazarus, and yet have gained 
the world and lost your life. For this is not 
merely a question of the things which you acquire 
by your exchange: it is a question of the law 
under which you put yourself, of the moral quality 
of the end which you seek. It was not Lazarus' 
poverty which carried him to Abraham's bosom, 
nor Dives' riches which put him on the other side 
of the gulf. It is possible for you to be quite as 
worldly in poverty as in wealth, in weakness and 
obscurity as in power. It is enough that you 
choose to follow the world's rule ; that you find 
your pleasure, whatever it be, in going the world's 
way ; that you live, in short, for just such ends, 
and in just such relations to your fellowmen, as 
you would if there were no such thing as God and 
heaven, love and unselfish ministry. 

But suppose we go to the entire length of the 
Lord's words. Suppose you gain the whole world, 
every thing the world has to give you. I submit 
to you first, that you have gotten something perish- 
able. Suppose you should buy a beautiful flask 
of some precious cordial, with the understanding 
that there was a secret leak in the flask which you 
could not find nor stop, and through which the 
precious liquid was slowly trickling away. Would 
you not be deemed a fool ? Yet you buy the world 
with this certainty. Grant that its pleasures are 
ravishing, its sights and harmonies bewitching: 
you know as well as I do that they cannot last. The 



DOES IT PAY? 29 

world is at the feet of your beauty, young woman. 
Are you willing to look to-day into a mirror which 
shall show you the face of thirty years hence ? The 
world praises you, young man. Do you not know 
that the world will soon tire of you, and kick you 
aside for a new object? Do you not know — you 
may easily know, for the thing is all through his- 
tory — that the very men who sing " Hosanna ! " 
to-day, will cry " Crucify him ! " to-morrow? Drip, 
drip! The golden cordial is going. The clock 
strikes one ! A drop gone. Two ! Another drop. 
Three ! Another. And so on round the dial, only 
to begin again. The world is passing away. Men 
and women are growing old before your very faces. 
Your purchase has this quality, at least, — it will 
not last. 

But I submit to you further, your interest in it 
will not last. I know it does not seem so now. 
You are so full of burning zeal to grasp the world 
that it seems as though your desire would never 
cool. But " the world passeth away, and the desire 
of it. " The fascination of the world is largely in 
your zest for it. The richest banquet has no charm 
for you if you are sick or surfeited. But you see 
for yourselves that the zest for the world passes 
away with the world. There were certain things 
which you longed to have and to do when you were 
boys and girls ; you are not very old now, but you 
do not care for those things any more : and that 
weakening of desire is going on all the time. The 
time comes to all men when they say, " I have no 
pleasure in them." The pleasures of youth re- 



30 DOES IT PAY? 

quire the vigor and the freshness of youth. The 
time comes when the strong man's ambition begins 
to droop, and he does not kindle at the call of 
fame. The time comes when the honored and 
praised man becomes indifferent to honor and 
praise, and only asks the world to let him go on 
his way in quiet. You have purchased, in short, 
something which you will cease to desire. 

And yet, ceasing to desire is not satisfaction. 
Your ceasing to desire will not be the feeling of 
the man whose appetite is sated, but rather of 
him whose food has become loathsome. And I say 
of your purchase, It will not satisfy you. Did you 
ever achieve any worldly success, or win any world- 
ly prize, that you did not want something else be- 
side ? Why, open your eyes, and look about you. 
All round you are men and women who have 
gained the world. The world is all before them 
where to choose. They can gratify their tastes ; 
they can eat and drink whatever the world's mar- 
kets or gardens furnish ; they can command every 
pleasure for the eye; they can travel when and 
whither they please; and yet they wander list- 
lessly about, not knowing what to do with them 
selves, — now in Europe, now on the Nile, now in 
Asia, going from scene to scene, from gallery to 
gallery, from spectacle to spectacle, all the while 
possessed and driven by a consuming restlessness. 
Or they are in business. The man has gotten his 
million : he wants another million, and then anoth- 
er. He has gotten his position, but there is an- 
other man a step higher than he. Alexander had 



DOES IT PAY? 31 

conquered the world : there was no more to con- 
quer, and he wept. You have purchased something 
unsatisfying. 

But still further. You have gotten something 
dangerous. Men would laugh to see you buying a 
pair of fetters or handcuffs in the market, but that 
is just what you are doing. You think you are 
buying something to possess : did it ever occur to 
you that it might possess you ? You are buying 
the world as a servant : did it ever occur to you 
that you might change places, and that the world 
might become master, and a hard one at that? 
" The wages of sin." But it is a master, and not a 
servant, that pays wages. No doubt of it. When 
you buy the world, you buy a master at the price 
of your life. A terrible mistake, to find that you 
have paid your best, your all, for slavery, when you 
thought you were buying freedom. Do you think 
that is a morbid fancy ? Nay : see for yourselves. 
Anything that is necessary to a man is his master, 
is it not ? Did you never see a man whose whole 
thought and life had been concentrated on money- 
making, and who could not rest when he wanted to, 
could not live without the excitement of the money- 
market? Did you never know a man's honesty 
mastered by the love for gain? Did you never 
know a man who had fed himself on the world's 
praise, until, when his banquet was withdrawn, and 
men forsook his shrine for that of another popular 
idol, his manhood drooped and shrivelled, and he 
became a disappointed, snarling misanthrope ? Did 
you ever know a more relentless, masterful demon 



82 DOES IT PAY? 

than that which drives the woman whose chief end 
in life is social position ? A dangerous thing this 
purchase ! The selfish man is a suicide : his lower 
self kills the higher. A man takes on the measure 
of his aim. He who aims high is the nobler, even 
though he miss his mark. His arrow will fly high- 
er aimed at the sun, than when aimed at something 
on his own level. You see and know for your- 
selves that one who lives for low, sensual ends is 
lower and meaner in the quality of his manhood. 
Dangerous ! you know what masters drink and the 
passion for gaming become. Dangerous ! there is 
a life going on in certain circles in this city, which 
veils itself under social proprieties and elegances, 
but which is aptly described by the term " fast." 
A continuous whirl of feasting and spectacles and 
carnivals, which is undermining some of the bright- 
est youthful promise, and blighting some of the 
best young manhood and womanhood of this city. 
Do you know what the end of that will be ? Some 
of you have seen Couture's great picture, " The 
Decadence of the Romans," in the gallery of the 
Luxembourg at Paris, — a picture of a luxurious 
hall, where a frenzied orgie is at its height, a car- 
nival of drunkenness and wantonness. A drunken 
youth, with a wreath in his tangled hair, sits upon 
a pedestal ; while a reeling boy proffers a dripping 
goblet to the marble mouth of a statue. The old 
Roman dignity is gone from the brutalized faces of 
the revellers, which contrast sadly with the noble 
features of the statues of the old Roman worthies 
ranged round the hall, and with the sad faces of a 



DOES IT PAY? 33 

group of thoughtful-looking men who are quitting 
the scene. And what is perhaps as significant as 
any other feature is, that the faces of this picture 
present a surprising likeness to faces which one 
sees every day in the streets of Paris, and that the 
models for this wreck of human nature are fur- 
nished by the painter's own city. It is a truth not 
told by Paris only. It has been told over and 
over again, as one city after another — Antioch, 
Corinth, Pome, Sybaris — has gone over the preci- 
pice. It is the story of the inevitable end of fast 
life and of fast society. You buy a dangerous thing 
when you buy the world. 

And, once more, you come to the line at last, 
and pass over. You and I do not know much 
about that future world: speculation amounts to 
little. The word of God is reticent about details ; 
and all that we do know, we know from that Word. 
But from that Word we do know something of the 
moral conditions of the future life. About one 
thing there cannot be any doubt ; and that is, that 
the only thing we carry over the line with us is our- 
selves. What we are goes nakedly into that world, 
without any of the disguises or deceptions with 
which circumstances invest character here. " We 
brought nothing into this world, and it is certain 
we can carry nothing out." Whatever price you 
pay for the world, you leave the world behind you 
when you pass the gate of death. If, then, that 
is all you have gotten, what do you carry into 
the next world ? You have given your life for the 
world. You cannot give it, and have it too. The 



34 DOES IT PAY? 

world has passed away, and you go to face God — 
with what? The only thing that has any hold on 
the future is the Christ-like self, trained in the 
school of faith and self-denial and ministry ; and 
if you have not that, if you have parted with that 
for the world, what have you? What shall it 
profit you if you shall have gained the whole 
world, and lost your life? I give you Christ's 
teaching, not mine. He knew both worlds. He 
has told you the solemn truth betimes, that you 
might not find it out only when the mischief was 
done ; and if, when you get into that new life, this 
truth shall come to you as a new discovery, rest 
assured it will bring pain and anguish with it. 

Christ asks you this morning, " Does it pay ? " 
He appeals to fact, to your observation, to your 
common sense. Does it pay? Is it a good bar- 
gain ? " What shall a man be profited if he shall 
gain the whole world, and forfeit his life ? or 
what shall a man give in exchange for his life ? " 
Or let another evangelist give you the same truth 
in his way : " For what is a man profited if he gain 
the whole world, and lose or forfeit his own self? " 
Is it a good bargain ? — a world that passes away, 
a desire that passes away ; an unsatisfying world ; 
a world that carries in itself the seeds of dan- 
ger and disaster ; a world that proves a hard and 
cruel master, and gives slavery instead of free- 
dom. All this for a life inspired and guided by 
Christ, a life in communion with heaven, a life 
rich in helpfulness and love ; a faith which con- 
quers the world, and makes you superior to its 



DOES IT PAY? 35 

chances and changes and sorrows ; a hope of eter- 
nal rest and eternal life, — is it a good bargain ? 

My young friends, I would save you from this 
fearful mistake. Christ would save you; and 
therefore his call is strong and urgent to you to- 
day : " Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his 
righteousness." You tell me there is much good 
in the world, much that may rightly be enjoyed ; 
that God made the world to be used. That is 
all true. God did make the world for you to use 
and enjoy, but under his direction ; and it may be 
well for you to remember, that, setting aside all 
considerations of the future life, you will make 
the most of the world by following Christ. You 
will make the world your servant, instead of your 
master. You will enjoy its lawful pleasures with- 
out a sting, instead of being ridden and driven by 
it as by a demon. The alternative of this fear- 
ful purchase we have been considering is before 
you. Christ stands beside you in the market- 
place, and asks what it will profit you to gain the 
world and lose yourself, and then says to you, 
" Follow me ! Yes, along the way of the cross ! 
yes, leaving self behind! but my yoke is easy, 
and my burden is light : you shall find rest unto 
your souls ; you shall not walk in darkness ; you 
shall not want for the best of society. Lo ! I am 
with you alway, even unto the end of the world." 
Self may die, but the world will be the richer for 
the fruit of a ministering life ; and beyond is rest, 
reward, heaven. 



III. 

THE SINGLE NEED. 



III. 

THE SINGLE NEED. 

" But the Lord answered and said unto her, Martha, Martha, 
thou art anxious and troubled about many things : but one thing 
is needful : for Mary hath chosen the good part, which shall not 
be taken away from her." — Luke x. 41, 42. 

MARTHA was determined to provide a fine 
entertainment on this occasion. She was 
doubtless a notable housewife, and, not unnatu- 
rally, a little proud of it ; and she had with her, 
to-day, her dearest and most honored guest, and 
was bent on setting before him her best, and in her 
best style. So there was much anxious discussion, 
we may suppose, about what dishes should be pre- 
pared, and not a little worry about their being 
properly cooked and served, and that the honored 
guest should have what might please him most. 
It was a loving impulse on her part, and our Lord 
did not fail to appreciate it. All natures do not 
express their affection in the same way. What a 
blessed fact it is that our Master and Judge sees 
the love behind the differences, and tolerates the 
differences for the love's sake ! 

Mary, though her quiet sitting at Jesus' feet was 
in strange contrast, apparently, with Martha's 



40 THE SINGLE NEED. 

bustling activity and worry, showed, on other 
occasions, that she was not indisposed to active 
ministry. It was Mary who brought the flask of 
spikenard, and anointed the Lord's feet at that 
same table ; and the words in this story seem to 
indicate that she had been assisting Martha in her 
preparations before Jesus came : but her finer 
spiritual instinct discerned that there was a better 
way of entertaining him than by feasting him. 
Custom in all ages, I know, has prescribed a feast 
as an appropriate way of honoring a guest ; and in 
one sense it is so. You give a man a mark of 
your confidence and respect by inviting him to 
your table ; but you do not, after all, if you will 
think of it, show him the highest mark of respect 
by inviting him to a splendid and formal banquet, 
assuming that he is best entertained by the grati- 
fication of his appetite. You pay him a higher 
token of your regard when you invite him to par- 
take of your informal family meal ; taking him 
into your private life, and assuming that he cares 
more for your society than for your fare. Mary, I 
repeat, discerned this fact, with a loving woman's 
quick perception ; and so she was less anxious than 
Martha about the details of the feast. She had 
done all that she thought necessary for comfort 
and decency ; and she valued her guest enough to 
desire to get something more out of his visit than 
the mere pleasure of seeing him eat, or the gratifi- 
cation of having him praise her viands. Call it a 
kind of selfishness, if you will ; indeed, Martha had 
no hesitation in calling it so : it was nevertheless 



THE SINGLE NEED. 41 

true, that Mary was bent on enjoying as well as 
entertaining her guest. Surely we are all selfish 
to that extent. She knew the blessing of Jesus' 
presence in the house. Are there not some Marys 
to-day, who, if he should come into their houses, 
would well-nigh forget altogether to lay the table, 
in their eagerness to hear the words of him who 
spake as never man spake ? Let us hope so, at 
least ; because there can be no doubt that Mary's 
attitude was the more pleasing of the two to the 
Lord, that her spiritual instinct was keener, and 
her spiritual fibre finer, than Martha's. The Lord's 
gentle and affectionate rebuke of Martha, — so 
gentle, so playful I had almost said, as to rob it of 
its sting, — and his commendation of Mary, set 
that beyond question, and give us our lesson to- 
day, — " Martha, thou art anxious and troubled 
about many things : but one thing is needful : for 
Mary hath chosen the good part, which shall not be 
taken away from her." 

In the first place, observe that Christ's words 
imply no disapproval of active service as against a 
contemplative or meditative life. It has been a fa- 
vorite fancy to make these two characters typical, 
— the one of the active, and the other of the con- 
templative, life ; but the fancy is not borne out by 
fact, nor is it the contrast between these two that 
is present to the Saviour's mind. It is not Martha's 
activity that he is rebuking, but her anxiety and 
distraction. He who went about doing good, and 
who said, " My meat is to do the will of Him that 
sent me," was not the one to rebuke active minis- 



42 THE SINGLE NEED. 

try. The point of his rebuke lies in enforcing 
the pursuit of one thing as against many things. 
Martha is distracted and bustling about many 
things : Mary has chosen one thing, — a good part 
which shall not be taken away from her, — and that 
thing alone is needful. It may have been that the 
peculiar form of the expression grew out of the 
feast itself. Martha has provided, with much 
worry and care, many things to eat. To sustain 
life, only one thing is absolutely needful ; or, as 
some read it, " There is need of few things, or of 
one." Be this as it may, the lesson is plain : the 
life of the soul depends on one thing ; the whole 
energy of the soul should be concentrated upon 
that. 

That accords with the Saviour's teaching else- 
where : " Leave all, and follow me ! seek first one 
thing, — the kingdom of God ! " The man in 
the parable, when he had lighted on the hidden 
treasure, concentrated all his desire and all his 
fortune on that one field ; and, selling all that he 
had, he bought it. The pearl-merchant, who was 
seeking many goodly pearls, at last sold every 
thing for one wonderful gem. All the law is 
summed up in one word. Now, if we will only 
think of it, we shall see that just that simplicity 
is what we are seeking everywhere. Wherever 
we have a variety of facts or details to deal with, 
we are not satisfied until we find some law or 
some principle, some one thing which includes 
them all. We see the stone fall to the ground 
when it leaves our hand, and the planets held 



THE SINGLE NEED. 43 

in their orbits. We are delighted when we can 
group these two facts, apparently so unrelated, 
under the one law of gravitation. When work 
involves a multitude of details requiring a mul- 
titude of separate forces, we aim to find one 
single force which will take up all the others 
into itself, and do their work. Suppose a man 
who had never seen a great machine-shop, and 
who knew nothing of the power of steam or water, 
were set down in a great hall full of lathes and 
looms and circular saws, and required to set the 
machinery in motion : how many men he would 
call in ! how many separate contrivances he would 
apply to each machine ! how he would bustle about 
from wheel to wheel, from lathe to lathe, now 
heaving away at a great trip-hammer, now cutting 
his ringers on a circular saw, now turning round 
the driving-wheel of a lathe ! And at this point 
the experienced engineer comes in, and laughs as 
he sees the poor man's perplexity, and says to him, 
"My friend, all this trouble is unnecessary: only 
one thing is needful ; " and he slips a belt over a 
drum, and pulls a lever, and behold ! the whole hall 
is in a whirl, — lathes, saws, trip-hammers, all in 
motion, without a hand on any of them. Or, here 
is a schoolboy with his arithmetic before him, and 
a whole page of " examples " to work out : and he 
takes each example by itself, and tries to think his 
way through it ; trying all sorts of experiments, 
applying one method to one, and another to another, 
and getting more confused every minute. Present- 
ly the teacher looks over his shoulder at his slate 



44 THE SINGLE NEED. 

covered with a chaotic mass of figures, and glances 
at the boy's hot and troubled face, and says to 
him, " You are taking a good deal of unnecessary 
trouble. This is not as hard as it looks : only one 
thing is needful ; all these examples are illustra- 
tions of one law." And he sits down, and explains 
a simple principle to the lad ; and then the work 
becomes a delight. The boy has a clew in his hand 
which leads him straight through the whole laby- 
rinth of figures. He turns from the multitude of 
details to the principle, and finds that the details 
arrange themselves, and the answer comes right 
every time. 

So that there is nothing arbitrary or unnatural, 
or even unfamiliar, in the gospel's summing itself 
in one thing, and concentrating men's attention on 
that. It is evident, as we have already seen, that 
the gospel illustrates this great truth of centrali- 
zation. It is intensely centralized. Whether we 
regard it as a system, as a life in man, as a code of 
laws, as a theory of morals, — from all these points 
of view, the lines run straight to Christ. As a 
system, it centres in his person ; as a life, in man : 
its moving forces are love and faith toward Christ ; 
its ultimate aim, conformity to the mind and will 
of Christ : as a code of laws, Christ is the fulfil- 
ment of the law, its perfect illustration ; as a 
theory of morals, it is summed up in obedience to 
Christ. It keeps this one figure constantly before 
us. It groups all details round him. God's great 
gift to the world is Jesus Christ ; and with him, he 
gives us all things. Not that he adds all things to 



THE SINGLE NEED. 45 

the gift of Christ as another and distinct expres- 
sion of his love, but rather that Christ carries all 
other things with him in the nature of the case. 
The greater gift takes up all the minor gifts into 
itself — includes them. When a man buys an 
estate of so many acres, he does not ask for sepa- 
rate titles for the woodland and the pasture and 
the streams and the mines. He wants one title to 
the estate. He pays so much ; and then, if there 
is gold or coal or an oil-well on the estate, that is 
his. The purchase of the estate gives him com- 
mand of all its possibilities, whether apparent or 
latent. And so, when God would lead a man to 
spiritual power and riches by the most direct road, 
he leads him to Christ. He says : " Receive him 
implicitly. Only that one thing is needful; the 
rest follows, the rest is contained in him, all things 
are in him, — all power, all grace, all wisdom, all 
spiritual possibilities of every kind ; and, therefore, 
when you receive him, you receive all these things 
with him." That is Paul's simple logic. "All 
things are yours because ye are Christ's, all things 
are Christ's because he is God's ; and therefore, in 
Christ, God becomes yours, and God is all in all." 
If this be so, shall we be surprised to hear Christ 
insisting upon the one thing ? to hear him say, — 
" Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his right- 
eousness ; and all these things shall be added unto 
you"? 

Now, this seems simple ; but practically it is not 
so easily realized as we might expect. It is the 
higher spiritual outlook which reveals this sim- 



46 THE SINGLE NEED. 

plicity and centralization of the gospel. When 
you are set down for the first time in a great and 
strange city, the streets are a labyrinth to you ; 
and when you strike out into the city, and begin 
to explore it, you get no sense of system in the 
arrangement of the streets : you lose yourself in 
all sorts of by-ways and blind alleys, and your 
walk is a constant succession of experiments. But 
when you climb to the top of some cathedral-tower, 
and look down, the confusion resolves itself. You 
see the central square or the market-place, and 
how all the streets have a certain relation to that. 
So it is the higher outlook, I repeat, which reveals 
how the gospel is centred. Lower down, it pre- 
sents great possibilities of confusion ; because the 
gospel, in one aspect, is a thing of infinite details. 
It is a system framed for life, and for life on every 
imaginable side, and for application to every possi- 
bility of life. It embraces an immense range of 
duties and attainments. Life along its whole line 
touches the moral and spiritual kingdom. And 
when a man confronts the gospel on this side, — 
and that is the side on which, perhaps, the majority 
of men approach it, — he is appalled. Like Mar- 
tha, he becomes cumbered and anxious with the 
thought of much serving. He does not see that 
the gospel is any thing else than service, and ser- 
vice touching an infinite variety of details, and 
service tested by a perfect moral standard. He is 
occupied with the thought of how he can deal 
with this mass of details ; and it does not at once 
occur to him that he may get at the details of 



THE SINGLE NEED. 47 

service by a shorter process, that he may be placed 
at a point from which the details will all arrange 
themselves, that he may come under the power of 
an impulse which will make duty meat instead of 
drudgery, and carry all duties and all services 
easily along with it. The sooner that man gets 
through Christianity as a system, to Christ as a 
friend and helper, the better for him. Suppose a 
boy taken from his home at an early age, and sent 
to school in a foreign land. He has staid there 
year after year, until his impressions of the faces 
and voices and incidents of his home have well- 
nigh faded out. Occasionally some one visits him 
who has lately seen his home, and brings him mes- 
sages from parents and friends. The boy is natu- 
rally eager to know all about that home. " Tell 
me how father and mother look. Tell me how 
large my brother has grown. Tell me how the 
house is furnished, and whether the trees are still 
in such a place." And the visitor says, "Your 
home is a charming place. Your parents are loved 
and honored everywhere, and their household is 
ordered with the utmost system and precision : no 
drones are allowed there. Each son and daughter 
has specified duties. Every thing must be done 
on time, and well and thoroughly done." And as 
such reports reach him again and again, the boy 
becomes troubled and anxious at the prospect of 
going home. He is afraid he cannot fit himself 
to that exact and beautiful system, that he cannot 
meet all those requirements, that he will bring 
reproof and displeasure upon himself by inadver- 



48 THE SINGLE NEED. 

tency ; and so all the pleasure gradually fades out 
of the prospect of going home, until he comes 
actually to dread it, and would rather stay in 
the far-off land. Home has taken on, in his mind, 
the character of a well-conducted workhouse. 
But oh, how little he suspects the joy and expec- 
tation and longing which pervade that home in 
the near prospect of his coming ! He cannot see 
the preparations which busy the mother's hands 
from morning till night for his welcome and com- 
fort. He does not suspect the father's nervous, 
growing restlessness as the day draws near for 
the arrival of the ship. And at last it comes. 
The carriage drives up to the door : the boy leaps 
out, and is clasped in his father's arms, and his 
young head bedewed with such tears as only a 
mother can shed, and is led into the light and 
cheer and hilarity of home ; and, in a moment, 
all that dread and anxious care which have been 
oppressing his heart for months are gone. The 
atmosphere of love in which he finds himself, a 
single glance at the faces of his parents, dispel 
those false pictures of his fancy like a dream. It 
does not take him long to see that the household 
is well-ordered, that every thing moves like clock- 
work, that his brothers and sisters are trained to 
implicit obedience. But those things do not trou- 
ble him any more. He sees them all through the 
medium of his parents' love ; and he knows by in- 
stinct, that under the shadow of that home, under 
the guidance of those parents, he will find a place 
in the home-system, and a round of duties which 



THE SINGLE NEED. 49 

will be a joy. One look assures him of all pos- 
sible wisdom for his direction, all possible conces- 
sion to his weakness, all possible tolerance for his 
mistakes. He is in his own home, girt round 
by love, — a happy son. Duty and fidelity will 
spring as naturally, and will regulate themselyes 
as sweetly, as the growth of a flower. 

The first thing with us all, the one thing, is to get 
home to Christ, — not merely to read about him or 
to speculate about his character, but to get face to 
face with him. A great many things will take care 
of themselves then which distract and make us 
anxious now, and lay us open to the rebuke which 
Martha received. There is a law of duty, with 
many provisions and touching many things; but 
when shall we learn to go first behind the law to 
Christ himself, and sit like Mary at his feet, and 
learn the lesson of duty as he shall expound it to 
us ? When shall we learn that duty, in its multi- 
tude of forms, becomes a new and a simpler and a 
sweeter thing the moment it is seen in the light 
of love for Christ ? Oh, how this theory of many 
things to be done dominates and rides us ! how rest- 
less and fretted we get under it ! so much to do ! 
so much to do ! so fearful that we shall not over- 
take our work ! so afraid of our Father's displeasure 
if our work falls into arrear ! each day a wearying 
strain to accomplish so much ! as if Christ were 
no more than a taskmaster, and our Father's house 
only a workhouse ! We are sincere about it too : 
we want to do God's will, we want to please Christ ; 
but we get so little comfort out cf it ! Christian 



50 THE SINGLE NEED. 

life is a life of duty and of service ; but I have yet 
to learn where, in the New Testament, Christ puts 
service as a perpetual burden. I do hear him say- 
ing, " My yoke is easy, and my burden is light." 
Somehow I have gotten the impression, in my study 
of the Gospels and of the life of Christ, that service 
may be a joy. Even in lower regions, I think we 
have all known cases of men's enjoying their daily 
task, going with delight to their studio or their 
library or their factory ; and if one can be happy 
in these daily tasks, why must the service of Christ 
be drudgery ? It is not so, and the secret and the 
correction of the mistake alike lie in these words 
of the Master. We contemplate too many things : 
we range all along the vast circumference of duty, 
instead of striking direct for the centre ; we live 
by law, which takes up duty in detail, instead of by 
love, which masses and carries all details. But one 
thing is needful, — to receive Christ into our life 
with all our hearts, with complete self-abandon- 
ment. This will change us from slaves into sons. 
" To as many as received Him, to them gave He 
power to become sons of God." This will not re- 
lieve us of service, but it will make our service the 
service of sons ; and you know, without any words 
of mine, the difference between the service of a son 
and of a servant. 

Our religious education, and the circumstances 
amid which we live, make it important that we 
should give heed to this truth. The word which 
Christ uses in his rebuke to Martha is the same 
which he employs in the exhortation : " Be not anx- 



THE SINGLE NEED. 51 

ions for your life." It is the word which means 
dividing, distracting care, — care which divides the 
heart from God ; care which pulls us many differ- 
ent ways ; care which sets its stamp on our lives, 
and makes them fussy and turbulent. And the 
great danger in the religious life of people in a great 
city like this, is distraction. Duty pulls so many 
different ways : there are so many calls to help and 
to achieve, so many shining opportunities of doing 
good, that it is very easy to foster the Martha type 
of life here. And then, too, there is, to many 
spirits, a fascination about doing. They love to be 
active, and activity appeals to the world as a good 
thing in itself. The tendency is to look upon a 
man who is constantly busy about a great number 
of things as a useful and important man. And the 
busy man knows that, and his self-importance is 
flattered by it; and close by this lies the great 
danger of making activity cover the whole ground 
of religion, and of sinking the equally important 
requirements of prayer and meditation and self- 
examination. And a man who lives by this theory 
will, spiritually, deteriorate very fast. That say- 
ing, " To labor is to pray," is a very pretty little 
phrase, and carries a grain of truth ; but its popular 
interpretation is, that work is a substitute for prayer, 
which is sheer nonsense. Our Lord was the busiest 
of men while on earth ; but he retired often to the 
mountains, and to other secret places, to commune 
with the Father. Again let it be repeated, — it can- 
not be repeated too often, — the one thing needful 
in the Christian life, as in the solar system, is, that 



52 THE SINGLE NEED. 

it be properly centred ; and as, in the solar system, 
two forces are necessary, — the one to hold the heav- 
enly bodies to the centre, the other to send them 
wheeling in space to do their office of enlighten- 
ing the world and regulating times and seasons, — 
so, in Christian life, prayer is the centripetal force, 
holding and drawing the man to Jesus Christ, his 
true centre : while the impulse to work is the cen- 
trifugal force, sending him out along the orbit of 
holy ministry. These forces must be kept balanced. 
If a man does nothing but pray and meditate, his life 
becomes morbid and unprofitable. If he does noth- 
ing but work, he loses his hold on Christ, and swings 
farther and farther from the centre which regulates 
and warms and enlightens him. He gets out of his 
true orbit, and becomes distracted amid a multitude 
of duties lying in other orbits, and is deceived in 
thinking that he is one of God's lights in the world, 
when he more resembles an errant marsh-fire. 
Any thing which breaks the conscious connection 
of faith and love with Christ is one of those dis- 
tractions against which Christ so kindly warned 
Martha, no matter whether it be good work in 
itself, or even work done in the name of Christ. 
Much of the work done in Christ's name, if we are 
to believe Christ himself, will not stand the test of 
the last day. " Many will say to me in that day, 
Have we not prophesied in thy name, and in thy 
name have cast out devils, and in thy name done 
many wonderful works ? And then will I profess 
unto them, I never knew you." 

The intense centring of the life on Christ does 



THE SINGLE NEED. 53 

not divorce it from service, as we have seen. It 
generates service, but it regulates service ; nor 
does it deprive the life of variety. No life is less 
monotonous than one which is in conscious, close 
communion with Christ. Paul said, "I deter- 
mined to know nothing among you save Christ." 
Yet what a variety and range of activity that life 
presents ; and withal, what a simplicity and exqui- 
site regulation of activity. There is no clashing 
or confusion of duties. He simply walks day by 
day after Christ, and the duties meet him in due 
order. There is no anxiety about strength, even 
in that sickly and much-burdened man; Christ 
has engaged to provide for that : there is no trou- 
ble about methods ; Christ lays them down : there 
is no fretting about visible success ; he is not 
responsible for success, only for duty. The excel- 
lency of the power is of God, not of him; and 
the key to all this is one thing, — he tells us what 
it is when he comes to the end, — one thing which 
he had held all through, while every thing else 
had been swept away : " I have kept the faith ! " 
and, instead of being cumbered with much serv- 
ing, we hear him saying to the Philippians, — to 
whom, perhaps more than to any other church, he 
revealed his heart, — "I have learned, in whatso- 
ever state I am, therewith to be content. In every 
thing and in all things have I learned the secret 
both to be filled and to be hungry, both to abound 
and to be in want. I can do all things through 
Christ that strengthens me." 

On this, then, let us fix our thought, — one thing 



54 THE SINGLE NEED. 

is needful. Christian belief, Christian life, Chris- 
tian experience, are simple ; but to realize that 
simplicity, either in theory or in practice, they 
must be viewed from their true centre. If the 
gospel is approached on the side of mere duty, — 
the duties which we have to do, the spiritual 
attainments we have to make, — it is a mass of 
confusion. If, on the other hand, we go straight 
to Christ, receive him into our hearts, gather up 
our whole life into simple, loving, believing con- 
secration to him, keep ourselves by faith and 
prayer in continual contact with him, always 
within the sound of his voice, always hearing, 
pondering, and practising his words, — then the 
confusion resolves itself, and duty and place and 
attainment will take care of themselves. We" too 
often act as if God had merely recognized us as 
his children, and given us the freedom of his 
house, and then left us to ourselves to work out 
our life as best we could. That is not God's way. 
When he makes us his children through faith in 
Christ Jesus, he assumes the care of our life in 
all its details. He not only turns us loose in his 
house : he goes with us into every corner, and 
shows us its treasures. He not only gives us the 
freedom of his domain : he assigns each of us his 
plot of ground, and stands by us while we try to 
sow the seed and water the growths, and teaches 
us how to be workers for and with him ; and as 
for our care, all that tends to distract and cumber 
and confuse us he bids us cast it all on him. 
Christian life, I say, is simple. It is summed up in 



THE SINGLE NEED. 55 

one thing, — " Follow me ! " It may seem to us 
that that is a little support on which to cast such 
a burden and problem as life is to most of us, but 
we shall do well to try it. Day before yesterday 
I had occasion to go to the lower part of the city 
by the elevated railroad ; and, as I got out at 
Hanover Square, I looked down upon the street 
far below, and a thought something like this went 
through my mind: supposing that, without any 
knowledge of the existence and mode of working 
of an elevated railway, I had been placed on this 
train while asleep or unconscious, and had awak- 
ened at this station, and been told that I must get 
down to that street. I get out of the train, and 
find myself on a narrow platform. I look down 
on either side, and say, "No way down there, 
except by being dashed to pieces." Instinctively 
I follow those in front of me. Steps, but the 
door is shut: no getting down there. I follow 
still. A door, but it opens into an enclosure. I 
follow still. Another door, and there are steps 
which lead me safely and easily down to the 
street. I might have stood still, and distracted 
myself with a dozen devices for getting down. I 
might have gone bustling about, looking for a rope 
or a ladder. There was only one thing needful, 
and that was, to follow those who knew the way. 
So in our Christian experience, one thing is need- 
ful, — the part which Mary chose, to hear Jesus' 
words and to follow him. A good many times in 
the course of this life we shall be puzzled about 
how to get up or down or out, sadly puzzled if 



56 THE SINGLE NEED. 

we think it our business to extricate ourselves ; 
but those many things are not our business. The 
puzzle will resolve itself in clue time if we simply 
hold to the one thing, — following Christ. When 
you gave yourself to him, you took him in place 
of all human skill and wisdom, for every emer- 
gency. These things no longer concern you. He 
careth for you, and they may all be laid on him. 

The pertinent, practical, pressing question re- 
mains. If one thing is needful, if that one thing 
is a good part, is it yours? Face the question. 
Where is your life centred to-day? Have you 
many aims, or one aim? One master, and only 
one, is needful. No man can serve two. Who is 
your master ? The great object of life is one, — to 
be like Christ : is that your object, and are all 
minor objects taken up in that ? or is your mind 
divided between many objects ? The claims of the 
world are many and pressing, and seemingly im- 
portant ; but in the face of the teeming, crowding 
throng of worldly cares and labors and ambitions, 
is Christ, saying, " One thing is needful ! I am 
that one thing ! " Which voice will you hear ? 



IV. 

FACING GOD. 



IV. 
FACING GOD. 

" I have set the Lord always before me : because he is at ray 
right hand, I shall not be moved." — Ps. xvi. 8. 

CONVICTIONS are of two kinds. They are 
born of emergencies and of experience. The 
former are instinctive, springing into life full 
grown: the latter grow and mature slowly. A 
ship strikes a rock, and begins to sink. The con- 
viction of danger and of possible destruction takes 
shape at once in the mind of every passenger. 
This is the conviction of emergency. You are im- 
pressed with the amiable qualities of a man ; you 
desire his friendship ; you are prepared to admire 
and trust him : but that is not conviction. After 
years of intimacy, in which you have proved his 
powers, experienced his constancy and devotion, 
have always found him true and brave and pure, 
you are convinced of his worth. It becomes to 
you a fixed fact, which you unconsciously as- 
sume, as you do gravitation or the succession of 
night and day. Belief is not conviction, except 
in the germ. Conviction is faith in fruition, and 
fruition takes time. Belief may entertain reserva- 

59 



60 FACING GOD. 

tions, or hold itself subject to possibilities: convic- 
tion knows no reservation. Belief grasps : convic- 
tion possesses. Belief may run up into conviction. 
All well-grounded belief does ultimately. Belief 
may serve a temporary purpose while conviction is 
maturing, just as the cable serves while the bridge 
is being built. All that is real and valuable in 
belief ultimately passes into conviction, and is 
taken up into it. As a young Christian, you be- 
lieved the Bible to be the word of God, and the 
only infallible rule of faith and practice. You 
believed it on authority, on the testimony of your 
parents and teachers ; and that belief was enough 
to make you accept the Bible as your rule of 
life, and strive to keep its precepts. But that 
belief was probably disturbed. Authority was not 
enough for you. Questions were raised which set 
you thinking, doubting, and investigating. To-day 
you believe the Bible, but your belief has grown 
into conviction. Your belief on simple author- 
ity has given place to a deeper sentiment, based 
on the experience of years, in which the Bible has 
proved its power to instruct and comfort and en- 
lighten you. I remember going, in company with 
some brother ministers, to visit an aged clergyman 
then past his eightieth year. As we bade him fare- 
well, he laid his hand on the Bible, and said sol- 
emnly, " There, brethren, there is our authority : 
there is our guide." A young minister might have 
said that, and have believed it; but the words 
would have lacked the emphasis imparted by those 
long years, and that stormy life wrought out under 



FACING GOD. 61 

the guidance and inspiration of the word of God. 
We all felt that every fibre of the old man's being 
went into those words. 

Our text to-day is the utterance of such con- 
viction as this. When I say the text, I mean the 
whole psalm ; for this text gives the key-note to 
the psalm. It is not the exclamation of a man to 
whom a truth has come as a flash : it is the delib- 
erate outcome of a long and varied retrospect. It 
has a life behind it. The man is convinced that he 
shall not be moved; that he may safely and heart- 
ily rejoice ; that in the unseen world, as here, he 
will be safe and happy : and this conviction is the 
result of a life in which God has been continually 
before his face. He is not kindled into confidence 
and gratitude by a single act of Divine Providence. 
The providence has extended over his entire life. 
The Lord has fixed his place in life, and has pro- 
vided for his support : " The Lord is the portion of 
mine inheritance and of my cup." What Christ 
means when he says, "I am the bread of life," 
David means by the words, " The Lord is the por- 
tion of my cup ; " and in like manner he speaks 
in the familiar psalm : " Thou preparest a table 
before me : my cup runneth over." Moreover, the 
Lord has not suffered his enemies to deprive him 
of his portion : " Thou maintainest my lot. Thou 
preparest my table in the presence of mine ene- 
mies." And he has found it not only safe but 
pleasant to dwell in God's place, and to be fed by 
God. " The lines have fallen unto me in pleasant 
places." The portion of territory which God's 



62 FACING GOD. 

measuring-line has marked off for him has been 
a goodly heritage. Nor has he ever wanted for 
good advice. Jehovah has given him counsel; 
and with such an experience behind him, we are 
not surprised to hear him say, " My heart is glad, 
my soul rejoiceth. This poor flesh of mine must 
die ; but God, who has cared for me all along, will 
not give me up as a prey to the grave : he will 
point out to me the way of life. He who has 
been always with me, will continue to be with me ; 
and in his presence is fulness of joy. He is at my 
right hand, and at his right hand are pleasures 
forevermore." 

The secret of all this rejoicing and confidence, 
I repeat, is in our text. David has set the Lord 
always before him; and this is his reward, as it 
may be ours. Let us look now more closely at 
this thought of having God always before us. 

It is of the greatest importance what that is 
which is continually before us. That which is 
constantly in a man's eye must help very largely 
to shape him. I have heard a very significant 
criticism on a certain picture, to the effect, that, 
though it was a good piece of artistic work, it was 
not a good picture to live with. You would not 
wish to have hanging up in your sitting-room, and 
constantly in sight of your children, a picture of 
Herodias with the head of John the Baptist, or of 
a crazed mother in the act of murdering her babe. 
You try to keep pictures of wholesome subjects as 
well as of beautiful forms before your children's 
eyes; because you know that they are insensibly 



FACING GOD. 63 

educated by familiarity with such things. In an 
age of few books, men and women learned mostly 
by the eye. It was not wholly nor mostly idola- 
try which filled the old churches with pictures. 
The visitor to St. Mark's, in Venice, may follow 
for himself the footsteps of the earlier catechumen ; 
passing into the Christian temple through a vesti- 
bule of Old-Testament history wrought in mosaic 
pictures, and then reading, on the walls and domes 
within, the truths of crucifixion, resurrection, the 
baptism of the Spirit and the coming of the Lord 
to judgment, — all arranged in the order of Chris- 
tian thought. The peasant who passed over the old 
wooden bridge over the torrent at Lucerne had 
daily before him, in the painted compartments of 
the bridge, a reminder of that other stream which 
all must cross sooner or later. Nature sets her 
mark on character. If her surroundings are gloomy 
and savage, they impart a sombre tone to the men 
who live among them. Men tend to be narrowed 
or broadened by their daily task. The man who 
has columns of figures forever before him may 
easily degenerate into a mere calculating machine. 
If the thing which is constantly before us is larger 
and better than ourselves, its hourly presence re- 
bukes our littleness and our badness, and works to 
assimilate us to itself. If it is worse than our- 
selves, it draws downward. There was philosophy 
as well as enthusiasm in the apostle's exhortation 
to run, looking unto Jesus, and in Paul keeping 
his eye on the prize of his high calling, and reach- 
ing forth to that which is before. 



64 FACING GOD. 

But it may be asked, Is not God always before 
us? can we help having the Lord always before 
us ? Assuredly we can. The Psalmist evidently 
thinks so. He does not regard it as inevitable 
that we should have the Lord always before us. 
On the contrary, he speaks of those who hasten 
after, or, literally, take unto themselves another 
God. Both their course and his are matters of 
choice. He does not say, "The Lord is always 
before me," but " I have set him always before me." 
His own will, his own act, have had something to 
do with the matter. He has been at pains to bring 
God into the foreground, and to keep him there 
always. And there is nothing strange in this ; be- 
cause God manifests himself in the world, because 
every common bush is afire with him, it does not 
follow that men recognize the fact. There is 
abundance of sweet music in the world, but there 
are multitudes of people to whom it means no more 
than the rumble of the carts in the street. There 
are men who live all their lives amid the grandest 
scenery, but who see in it nothing but so much 
stone and timber : men to whom a great picture is 
meaningless, and literature as dumb as the pyra- 
mids. So, it is not strange if men should not see 
the God who puts himself before them in his Word 
and in his providences, in every star and flower and 
lightning flash. A sense must be educated to see 
God. The apostle is only stating what is a famil- 
iar fact to us in other departments, when he says 
" The natural man discerneth not the things of the 
Spirit of God. They are foolishness unto him. 



FACING GOD. 65 

He cannot know them because they are spiritually 
discerned." It is quite as likely, to say the least, 
that a man's spiritual sense should be uncultivated 
and dormant, and give him no knowledge of that 
vast spiritual economy which touches him every- 
where, as that his eye or his ear should be unim- 
pressed by pictures or harmony. A babe has the 
organs of vision, but nevertheless he must learn 
to see. 

This blindness towards God is a fact of history 
and of common experience. We say, for instance, 
as we read the history of Israel, that such mani- 
festations of divine glory and power could not 
fail to impress them : they were so mighty, so ter- 
rible, so unquestionable. And yet they did fail. 
The dividing of the Red Sea, and the lightnings 
and thunders of Sinai, were followed by the fren- 
zied dance round the golden calf. We say that the 
person and miracles of Christ were adapted to con- 
vince the most incredulous ; but they did not, as we 
see : and we hear Christ himself saying, " If I had 
not come and spoken unto them, they had not had 
sin : but now they have no excuse for their sin." 

Thus, then, God will not be, in any true sense, 
before our face unless we set him there. It is 
a matter which involves our determination and 
effort, a matter of special training and practice. 
There is a spiritual inertia to be overcome : there 
is to be corrected the perverse tendency of a na- 
ture which sets any thing before it rather than God. 
That bar of steel does not point naturally to the 
pole. Balance it on a pivot, and it will point south, 



66 FACING GOD. 

east, or west, as the case may be. It must be acted 
upon from without. It must have magnetic virtue 
imparted to it ; and then, and not till then, will it 
keep the north always before it. Man is not nat- 
urally religious. Naturally he does not point God- 
ward. No quality in him swings him inevitably 
round towards God. He must be set that way ; or, 
rather, he must set himself that way, under the 
divine power which comes down upon his will, and 
magnetizes it, and gives it its eternal direction. 

You will observe further, that this having God 
before the face requires persistency. It was not 
enough to bring God once or twice into the line of 
vision : he was to be kept there. The Psalmist 
tells us not only of an act, but of a habit : " I 
have set the Lord always before my face." Men 
often claim that they are susceptible to religious 
impressions, and are disposed to flatter themselves 
on the fact ; and it is a familiar enough fact, — it 
would be strange if it were not so, — that God 
often brings the face of the most unsusceptible 
man round to him by some display of his power, 
or by some stroke of his providence. Jonah tried 
to run away from God, but met him on the way to 
Tarshish : Balaam turned his back on God and his 
face toward Moab ; but the angel of God met him 
in a narrow place, where there was no chance of 
turning back. The impressions which men receive 
under such circumstances are vivid and truthful : 
the trouble is, that they do not expand into perma- 
nent convictions. When God sets himself before 
a man's face, it is in order to make the man set 



FACING GOD. 67 

God continually before his face. The crisis means 
an experience. A compass-needle would be to a 
sailor of no more account than a knitting-needle 
if it were made to point northward only by some 
violent shock : it is the fact of its ahvays pointing 
thither that gives it its value. 

It is this fact of persistency which gives value 
to David's saying : what he tells us is the story of 
a man who has become familiar with an object by 
long looking. It is not the kind of a story which 
Jacob would have told the morning after the vision 
at Bethel, but rather of the kind which Enoch 
would have told on the eve of his translation, — the 
story, not of a vision of God, but of a walk with 
God. When a man has shut himself up to one 
thing as the source of his strength and happiness, 
he will find out a great deal about that thing. 
Robinson Crusoe, when he had once made up his 
mind that his life must be confined to his little 
island, set himself to discover its resources, and 
found in it a multitude of things which he never 
would have known were there if he had been ex- 
pecting to sail away in a week or two. In that 
event he would have used his island only for the 
food and shelter of the day. That is the way 
in which many people deal with God : they turn 
their faces towards him when they have nowhere 
else to turn. They use his bounty when their own 
supplies fail. As soon as they have something else 
to look at, they turn their faces from God ; and it 
does not take much to turn them, either. A silver 
dollar held before your eyes will conceal the whole 



t>5 FACING GOD. 

orb of the sun. You can shut out an entire land- 
scape with a finger ; and it is amazing, likewise, 
what small things will divert men from God, 
what a little temptation will shut out an immense 
range of duty, responsibility, and privilege. Esau 
was the rightful inheritor of a splendid destiny ; 
but a coarse dish of red lentils shut out the whole 
brilliant future, and his birthright went for a mess 
of pottage. Our Psalmist fixes his gaze on God : 
nothing is to come between God and him. He has 
taken counsel with his soul, and said unto God, 
" Thou art my Lord. I have no good beyond thee. 
I have set the Lord always before my face." 

And one who thus keeps God always before him 
makes discoveries, and many of them. David, in 
the twenty-seventh Psalm, declares that he has 
desired one thing, and will seek after that ; but 
that one thing evidently includes a great deal for 
him. It will reveal to him the beauty of the 
Lord ; it will give him opportunity to ask ques- 
tions of divine wisdom ; it will afford him a hiding- 
place in time of trouble, and a means of triumph 
over his enemies. Let us, then, note a few of the 
many things which a man finds in God by keeping 
him always before his face. 

He finds himself revealed. In the Shinto tem- 
ples in Japan the shrines contain no altars, pul- 
pits, or pictures, but only a circular steel mirror. 
What it means is not known ; but it would be no 
inappropriate symbol in a Christian shrine, to set 
forth the self-revealing power of the word of God. 
Nor is the symbol without its warrant in Scripture. 



FACING GOD. 69 

You remember that James draws a picture of a 
man beholding his natural face in a glass, consult- 
ing his mirror for some temporary purpose of ar- 
ranging his dress or hair ; and then going his way, 
and forgetting all about it. And he puts this 
picture in contrast with another, of a man stoop- 
ing down, and looking attentively, and fixing the 
impression of what he sees, so as to keep it always 
before his face. This man, who looks steadfastly 
into God's perfect law, and translates what he 
sees there into daily practice, this man " shall be 
blessed in his doing," keeping God always before 
his face. The Psalmist tells us he receives coun- 
sel, and that, not only by way of direct communi- 
cation, but through the working of his own mind : 
" I will bless the Lord, who hath given me coun- 
sel : my reins also (that is, my heart) instruct me 
in the night seasons." An inner spiritual wisdom 
develops in the quiet meditation and communion 
with God in the night season. "The night sea- 
son," as some one has aptly said, " which the sin- 
ner chooses for his sins, is the hour when believers 
hear the voices of the heavenly life within them- 
selves." The man who studies God, studies self at 
the same time ; the man who steadfastly follows 
Christ, learns as much about self as he learns of 
Christ. Self-knowledge is the hardest kind of 
knowledge. The thing which is identified with 
our interest and pleasure is not always the thing 
which we know best. We shut our eyes to its im- 
perfections ; we look at it only on the side where 
it ministers to our gain or enjoyment ; we do not 



70 FACING GOD. 

like to pick flaws in the self which we love ; we 
refuse to see that it is fallible and proud, and 
otherwise faulty : it is ourself, and we stand by it. 
But when Christ persuades us to deny and lay 
aside self, he puts self in a position where we can 
study it from without ; where we can weigh and 
test it by higher standards ; where we can set it, 
with all its greed and conceit and sophistry and 
littleness, beside the perfect manhood of Jesus 
Christ, and, in the light of his symmetry and 
purity, see it as it really is : and hence the Psalm- 
ist says, " Thou hast set our secret sins in the light 
of thy countenance." If we would truly know 
what kind of men and women we are, we must 
set the man Jesus always before our face. 

Setting God before our face carries with it a 
power of growth. God is not only always before 
us : he is always going before us, and beckoning 
us to follow. The man who has his back towards 
God, like one who has the sun behind him, follows 
a shadow. The Bible, from one end to the other, 
is full of growth. It is itself a growth. It is a 
picture of God leading men ; and, as we read on, 
we are impressed with the fact of an advance in 
humanity. The plane is higher at the beginning 
of Matthew than at the beginning of Exodus ; 
and, moreover, the New Testament especially 
thrills with the summons to advance and growth : 
" Grow in grace." " Forgetting the things which 
are behind, and stretching forward to the things 
which are before." " Be no more children ; but 
grow up into him who is the head." " Press 



FACING GOD. 71 

toward the mark for tlie prize of your high calling." 
Constant contact with true greatness and goodness 
lifts even a small man. Enoch, who walked with 
God, must have acquired a divine quality in his 
manhood. In the very nature of the case, a man 
who has God always before his face cannot be 
stationary. A mountain is a constant temptation 
to climb ; and when one has climbed, and caught a 
view of still higher summits beyond, he is restless 
until he has climbed them too. The vision of God 
ever draws us on with sweet and powerful allure- 
ment. The more we learn of him, the more we see 
to be learned: the higher we rise in character, 
the greater possibilities of character are revealed. 
And the keeping of God constantly before the 
face engenders hope. Hope, if we are to believe 
Paul, is the very atmosphere in which a Christian 
lives and breathes. "We are saved in hope." 
The creation is indeed "subject to vanity," but 
44 in hope " that it shall be 44 delivered from the 
bondage of corruption into the liberty of the glory 
of the children of God." There are sufferings of 
this present time ; but God also is in this present 
time, alike as a fact and a promise of glory to 
be revealed. Amid the darkness and vagueness 
which encircled the Old-Testament future, this 
psalm is like a sweet flute-note amid the crash and 
discord of a vast orchestra. I know nothing more 
winning, more soothing, than these verses, which 
put the whole future into God's hands with such 
serene trust and sure confidence that all will be 
well for ever and ever. I have not been moved, 



72 FACING GOD. 

and " I shall not be moved ; " because the Lord is 
" at my right hand." Because he is at my right 
hand, my happiness is secure ; for " at his right 
hand are pleasures forevermore. In his presence 
is fulness of joy." I shall not wander in the dark 
and devious ways which lead to death, for " thou 
wilt show me the path of life." Death and the 
grave frighten me not : " thou wilt not leave my 
soul to the unseen world; thou wilt not suffer 
thy beloved one to see the pit. I have no good 
beyond thee." Oh, how wonderful that is ! No 
good beyond thee. Thou includest all good ; the 
remotest future will not carry me beyond thee ; 
the march of eternity will not overpass thee ; thou 
shalt still be continually before my face, age after 
age, as I shall rise and grow and work on ever- 
longer lines in the atmosphere of heaven, chan- 
ging, developing, but ever " into the same image, 
from glory to glory." In this world we are 
often troubled about the future. Sometimes the 
shadows fall backward, and cloud all our present 
with gloom : but it need not be so if only we keep 
the Lord continually before our face ; for then we 
are going forward to God, and after God; and 
whatever the future may have for us, it will have 
God, and that is enough. So Jesus evidently 
thought when he said to his disciples, " I will re- 
ceive you unto myself, that where I am, ye may be 
also." It was enough that they should be with him : 
they had, and could have, no good beyond him. 

To-day, as we approach the Lord's table, we 
bring David with us. The words of the Old-Tes- 



FACING GOD. 73 

tament saint fit into the holy rite, and carry with 
them a profound Christian meaning. For God 
ever before the face is a truth of God's economy 
in all dispensations, — a truth bound up with the 
fact of a human relation to God. The Christian 
dispensation brings out the truth with new power, 
by showing the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ. The holy sacrament is a constantly re- 
peated admonition to set the Lord — the Lord as 
revealed in Jesus, our Redeemer — always before 
our face. Its lesson is, " looking unto Jesus ; " 
looking, as a means to our successful running of 
our Christian race ; and its admonition is pointed 
in this, — that it emphasizes the ahcays, the contin- 
ual keeping of Christ before us. It is not meant 
to drag our faces round six times in the year, and 
to fasten them for an hour on Christ, only that we 
may turn them away again to the world and its 
vanities. It does indeed offer us a reminder of 
Christ; but it reminds us that Christ is not merely 
an incident of our life, but our life itself. It 
sharpens the spiritual perception, and brings out 
the lines of the beloved form more definitely ; but 
it says to us, " Look now, that you may continue 
to look." Keep the form which faith sees, always 
before your face. You who come to-day to enjoy 
this privilege for the first time, take this thought 
into all your life henceforth : for you can have 
no weightier thought attaching to this sacrament, 
than that it is an admonition to you to keep Christ 
before you in each day's life ; as on this day he is 
set before you in symbol. 



V. 
LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 



V. 

LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

" Jesus answered, Are there not twelve hours in the day ? If 
a man walk in the day, he stumbleth not, because he seeth the 
light of this world. 

" But if a man walk in the night, he stumbleth, because the 
light is not in him." — John xi. 9, 10. 

THE disciples were dismayed when Jesus pro- 
posed to go to Bethany to visit Lazarus. A 
Jewish mob was no trifle, and it was only a little 
while before that the Jews had sought to stone 
Jesus for what they counted blasphemy. They 
were orthodox but ferocious, and would not hesi- 
tate to murder him. 

Hence the disciples remonstrated against his 
exposing himself again to these fanatics : " Master, 
the Jews were but now seeking to stone thee ; and 
goest thou thither again ? " They spoke for them- 
selves as well as for him. Thomas evidently ex- 
pected that the journey to BetHany would result 
in death to him and to them. 

Jesus takes this opportunity to explain to his 
disciples the great principle on which he himself 
worked ; and, to commend this principle to them, 
he puts it in a figurative way. If a man walks 

77 



78 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

in the daytime by the light of the sun, he walks 
intelligently and securely. If he tries to walk in 
the dark, he stumbles, and goes astray. I walk 
in God's light, which shines on my path during 
the time he has fixed for my ministry. Wherever 
that light shines, I go, regardless of every thing 
but the light. So if you, my disciples, have this 
same divine light in you, and follow it, you will 
be as men walking in the daylight. Your path of 
duty will be clear. Without that light, you will 
be as men walking in the dark, — stumbling, and 
meeting disaster. You will have no clear or con- 
sistent ideas of duty, and your practice will be as 
confused as your ideas. 

We are thus led up to the question of the sim- 
plicity of duty. Somehow duty has come to be, to 
many of us, a very complicated matter ; and possi- 
bly our conceptions of it have tended to a little 
haziness. That duty presents problems, every one 
of us knows ; but it is a fair question, whether the 
problem always lies in the duty, and does not 
sometimes lie in us. It is a fair question, whether 
we do not often complicate the problem by adding 
factors of our own. It is a fair question, whether 
the haziness is not sometimes in our eyes, and not 
in the moral outlines which God draws. Christ 
asserts the possibility of the light in us being dark- 
ness. The oculist will tell you there is a blind 
spot in every eye. Possibly, when we think that 
God has made duty obscure, we have brought the 
duty into line with the blind spot. 

As a matter of precept, duty is simpler than 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 79 

perhaps we give it credit for being ; for, if duty is 
to be a thing of universal obligation, it must be 
simple in the nature of the case. To make it a mat- 
ter of subtle casuistry, of painful research and nice 
balancing, would be, at best, to limit it to a very 
few, and to make moral outcasts of the rest. The 
Jew of Christ's day made it just that. He had 
gotten into a muddle over the moral law ; but the 
muddle was in him, and not in the law. The law 
was so simple and clear that Christ threw it into 
two great principles; and Christ came not to 
destroy it, not to supplant it, but to clear it of the 
rabbinical rubbish with which the Jew had over- 
laid it. The fresh simplicity of our Lord's teach- 
ing was like a strong, wholesome breeze sweeping 
away cobwebs, and laying bare the original sim- 
plicity and directness of the old code. 

But, after all, our thought to-day does not turn 
on the simplicity of the moral law itself. Men 
stumble none the less because of this simplicity. 
Christ, in our text, does not put the blame of the 
stumbling on the law or on the complication of 
duty. It is not the geological structure of the 
stone which makes the man stumble : it is dark- 
ness or blindness. As men stumble who walk in 
the night, and stumble because they do not walk 
in the twelve hours of sunshine ; so, morally, men 
stumble because of moral darkness in themselves. 
" He stumbleth because there is no light in him" 
Our Lord here asserts that a divine light is given 
to men to guide them to duty, just as the sun is 
given to enlighten the way by which they travel, 



80 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

or the work which they do ; and that that light is 
placed by God himself in the man himself, just as 
the sunlight is set working through the human eye 
to produce vision. Hence he says elsewhere : " The 
lamp of thy body is thine eye : when thine eye is 
single, thy whole body also is full of light; but 
when it is evil, thy body also is full of darkness. 
Look therefore whether the light that is in thee 
be not darkness. If therefore thy whole body be 
full of light, having no part dark, it shall be 
wholly full of light, as when the lamp with its 
bright shining doth give thee light." When a 
man sees two trees where there is only one, or a 
crooked line where there is a straight one, or pris- 
matic colors in a house that is white, we do not 
blame the structure of the tree or the drawing of 
the line or the painting of the house. We say, 
the man's vision is diseased. A sound moral vision 
recognizes duty under every shape, and takes its 
measure. Hence the truth of our text is, that the 
recognition of duty, and the practical solutions of 
its problems, lie in the principle of loyalty to 
Christ. A divinely enlightened conscience and an 
obedient will, not only push, but lead. They 
prompt to duty, but they also define it. "I am 
the light of the world : he that followeth me 
shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light 
of life." In other words, he shall be enlightened 
as to how to live. The light shall shine upon the 
path of right living, and the path of the just shall 
prove to be as the shining light that shineth more 
and more unto the perfect day. 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 81 

Let us look, now, at the illustration of this truth 
in the incident of our text. Going to Bethany 
involved a question of duty for Christ. God was 
to be glorified in his son's victory over death, and 
the faith of the disciples was to be strengthened 
thereby. The obligation was laid upon Jesus to 
go to Bethany then. 

And to one who had no thought but to do the 
will of his Father, the case was very simple. No 
question was possible. There was that plain duty 
to be done, and the light shone full and clear upon 
the way to Bethany. 

But the disciples, in their natural timidity, put 
another element into the question, which compli- 
cated it : that was, the element of personal safety. 
"If you go to Bethany you will be stoned, and 
possibly killed." It is easy to see, that, if Jesus 
had entertained this suggestion, his mind would 
have been diverted from the plain duty before 
him. A new question would have been raised, 
which God had not raised at all. God's commis- 
sion said nothing about danger, stoning, or death. 
It was simply to go to Bethany, and to do what 
was to be done there. Every thing else was ex- 
cluded ; and so long as Jesus was true to the prin- 
ciple of simple loyalty in his own breast, so long 
as he refused to entertain any thought beyond 
that of implicit obedience to God's command as it 
stood, his course lay out in the clear light. It 
might bring him into peril, but the course itself 
was plain. If he meant simply to do right, the 
decision presented no difficulty : if he meant to 



82 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

save himself, then the question became full of un- 
certainties, and weighing of probabilities. From 
the moment of admitting that consideration, he 
would have walked in darkness. 

What an expounder of duty that element of 
singleness is ! How much meaning there was in 
our Lord's expression, — " A single eye " ! How 
much easier and simpler a man's walk and work 
are when he sees an object in its oneness, than 
when his diseased eye doubles it ! Is not single- 
ness of purpose an element of all the heroism of 
which you know ? Was there ever a great general 
whose thought was divided between victory and 
personal safety? Would the six hundred ever 
have passed into history if they had stopped to 
weigh the probabilities of mutilation and death? 
The familiar poem puts that singleness power- 

fully:- 

" Theirs not to make reply, 
Theirs not to reason why, 
Theirs but to do and die." 

The men who have moved society have moved 
under that principle of self-abandonment, seeing 
nothing but the end to be won. No man whose 
thought was divided between himself and his 
object ever succeeded as a moral reformer, or as a 
helper of the wretched. When a physician enters 
upon his profession, he does so with the knowledge 
that he must ignore contagion. That makes his 
duty very simple, — to relieve disease and pain 
wherever he finds them. The moment he begins 
to consider whether he may not expose his own 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 83 

life to fever or cholera, his usefulness is over. 
When Luther stood before the Diet at Worms, he 
had a terrible danger to face, but a very easy 
question to solve. His most significant words, as 
it seems to me, were, " I can do no otherwise : " 
the expression of a loyalty which could entertain 
no other thought along with a plain issue of duty. 
Had he thought of imprisonment, papal ban, papal 
favor, or death, Christendom would not be ringing 
to-day with the name of Luther. That inability 
to do any thing besides the one right thing carried 
the Reformation. 

And this singleness is the very essence of Chris- 
tian service, on Christ's own testimony. Its first 
law is, Deny self, — treat self as though it were 
not ; follow me. It is not always easy to follow 
Christ ; but the way, at least, is plain. 1 A greater 
difficulty arises the moment that the question be- 
comes one of compromising and adjusting between 
Christ and self. A man gets no divine help in the 
solution of that question, because Christ refuses 
altogether to entertain it. The command to take 
up the cross is the command to throw down self. 
The shoulder of self will not bear the cross. Self 
and the cross exclude each other. The only way 
in which self can ever be adjusted to the cross is 

1 " For the object of religion is conduct ; and conduct is really, 
however men may overlay it with philosophical disquisitions, the 
simplest thing in the world. That is to say, it is the simplest 
thing in the world, as far as understanding is concerned ; as re- 
gards doing, it is the hardest thing in the world. Here is the 
difficulty, — to do what we very well know ought to be done." — 
Matthew Arnold : Literature and Dogma. 



84 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

by being nailed to it. Any other mode of adjust- 
ment is as impracticable as the squaring of the 
circle. The vital question in all cases of duty is 
not the nature of the duty, but the fact of duty, 
and your and my attitude toward the duty. To 
what does the duty appeal in us ? Does it appeal 
to a settled principle that duty is to be done always 
and everywhere, because it is duty ? or to a princi- 
ple that duty is to be done under certain circum- 
stances, when it does not conflict with desire or 
self-interest ? If the appeal is to the former prin- 
ciple, then, though the duty itself may be hard, it 
is not hard to know whether it ought to be done. 
It is enough that it is duty. No man can ever 
walk in darkness who accepts that principle. The 
largest element of difficulty is removed from the 
case when self is forbidden to raise the questions 
of hard or easy, safe or dangerous. Self always 
makes greater difficulties than God does. 

Duty is a fixed fact, to be taken as it is. It 
does not adjust itself to us ; we must adjust our- 
selves to it : and that is a great deal easier, hard 
though it be, than to shape the duty according to 
our notions. There is a nebulous mass far off in 
the depths of space, — a tangled skein of stars, 
appearing to the eye like a volume of thin vapor. 
The problem before the astronomer may be very 
difficult of practical solution, but the nature of the 
problem is simple and clearly defined. He is to 
resolve that mist into its component stars, and to 
find out, if he can, the number and relative posi- 
tion of those stars. If he is bent on bringing the 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 85 

facts which his telescope discovers into harmony 
with some theory of his own, he complicates his 
task at once. The stars will not change their size 
or their position because of his theory. If he 
would know the facts as they are, he simply takes 
what his telescope gives him. Then every thing 
depends upon his telescope. Let some careless 
or malicious hand crack the lens, or incrust the 
mirror with a film, his observation results only in 
guess-work : but, with his lens and mirror clean 
and rightly adjusted, his eye penetrates the veil of 
mist ; and he brings back from the infinite spaces 
tidings which enrich the records of science. So, 
when men look at duty through loyal and obedient 
hearts, its lines come out plainly and sharply. 
Let self put a film over the spirit, duty remains 
unchanged. God's will must be done, but the man 
sees only a mist. That filmed eye raises more and 
harder questions than the duty itself. Duty is not 
complicated by elements of danger and self-sacri- 
fice : the complication comes out of our refusal to 
see these elements as parts of duty, out of our fruit- 
less attempt to see duty at some point from which 
the danger and sacrifice shall disappear, out of our 
determination to convince ourselves that any thing 
which involves danger and sacrifice cannot be duty. 
When the engineer sat down before the mountain 
which divides Italy from Switzerland, and decided 
that his railroad must go straight through that 
mountain, he had a difficult task indeed, but a 
simple one. His railroad must go under that 
mountain ; and you see, that, in addressing himself 



86 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

wholly to that solution of his problem, he at once 
got rid of a thousand questions as to the practica- 
bility of other routes, and the possibility of getting 
round or over the mountain. His task was infi- 
nitely simplified by his fixing upon a definite 
course, with all its difficulties. He could concen- 
trate all his ingenuity and skill on overcoming the 
difficulties. 

I take it no one ever had so clear a perception 
of the hardness and agony which his mission in- 
volved as Christ himself had ; so clear and vivid, 
indeed, that his humanity more than once recoiled, 
and cried, " Father, save me from this hour. If it 
be possible, let this cup pass from me!" And yet 
the closest study of Christ's life reveals not a 
shadow of hesitation or doubt about following the 
line of duty. His step is as firm toward Bethany, 
where he knows that the Jews may be waiting to 
stone him, as when he is going to the sweet retire- 
ment and hospitality of Mary's and Martha's home. 
Whether duty points to Zaccheus' feast or to 
Calvary, he walks with equal decision. He goes 
to the cross saying, " The Scripture must be ful- 
filled." He comes back from the dead saying, 
" Thus it behooved Christ to suffer." Sometimes 
as we look at this firm, constant walk of our Lord, 
we are moved to say, " Would that duty were as 
plain to me as it seems to have been to him ; would 
that I could move forward without hesitation as 
he did." And then we go on to reason that this 
may not be ; because Christ was so superior to us, 
and possessed of divine knowledge. But we are 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 87 

wrong there. Whatever Christ was, he was a man ; 
and duty was no different a thing to Christ than 
it is to us ; and Christ not only tells us in our text 
the secret of his own clear perception and unfalter- 
ing pursuit of duty, but gives us the same secret 
for our own use : " If a man walk in the day, he 
stumbleth not, because he seeth the light of this 
world." The case was not that Christ knew the 
nature and bearings of duty better than we do 
(though that is true), but it was that Christ 
walked in the light of simple loyalty to God, under 
the simple rule that God's will was to be done ; 
refusing to admit into his mind any question but 
this : " Is it, or is it not, the will of God ? " The 
motto of his life is given by himself at Jacob's 
well : " My meat is to do the will of him that sent 
me, and to finish his work." Living by that prin- 
ciple, he walked in the light. His eye was single, 
and his whole body was therefore full of light. 
He admitted no question of stoning or crucifying. 
He knew that duty involved loneliness and hatred 
and homelessness and persecution and crucifixion ; 
but it was enough that it was duty. And hence 
it is that his life, while it is the most tremendous 
tragedy in history, ranging through the whole 
gamut of human experience, marked by an infinite 
variety of incident, is the most purely simple, 
clearly cut life in all its relations to duty of which 
we have any knowledge. This singleness of eye, 
this principle of absolute loyalty to truth as truth, 
and to duty as duty, relieved his life of a thousand 
elements of perplexity and hesitation which con- 



88 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

fronted other men. As a straight road carries one 
past a multitude of thickets and bogs and stony- 
places, even though the road itself may be rough ; 
so Christ's path, though it was a rough way, and 
led to Gethsemane and Golgotha, carried him past 
all questions of policy, — questions of making a 
good appearance, questions of the good opinion of 
the world, of wealth, of worldly position, — past all 
the endless perplexities which wait on the effort to 
compromise between God and the world, all those 
things, in short, which are the torment of nine- 
tenths of the world to-day, and which make duty, 
even to so many Christians, a sphynx's riddle. 

Now, look at a contrast to this straightforward, 
clear course of Jesus at Bethany. Take an Old- 
Testament case, — Saul at Michmash. The matter 
of duty there was as plain and simple as at Beth- 
any. God had said to Saul, "Do not move the 
army without sacrificing to God ; do not offer sac- 
rifice yourself, but wait till Samuel comes." Saul 
had only to wait till Samuel should come, whether 
it were seven days, or seventy ; and if he had fixed 
his mind on that single point of duty, his course 
would have been as plain as the sun in heaven. 
There were indeed other considerations, but not 
for Mm to discuss. Obedience to that naked com- 
mand involved apparent trouble and disaster ; but 
God had said nothing about these, only " Wait." 
But Saul admitted those other considerations. He 
would not walk in the light of that simple duty. 
He admitted the possibility, that circumstances 
might justify him in disobeying God. And the 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 89 

moment he did that, you see how his course became 
complicated. What a multitude of hard questions 
crowded upon him. The enemy was concentrat- 
ing, the soldiers deserting : a decisive blow must 
be struck. He was burdened at once with the 
solution of all these difficulties, instead of having 
sinipty to wait. True faith and simple loyalty 
would have left all these matters in God's hands ; 
but Saul had not true faith and simple loyalty. 
He assumed the functions of a priest, he sacrificed 
to the very God he was disobeying ; and his pre- 
sumption cost him his kingdom. 

In short, the life of obedience to God, while it 
bears the cross, and includes danger and self-sacri- 
fice, is simpler and easier than the life of worldly 
policy and self-interest. The selfish life always 
walks in darkness, though it often prides itself on 
its astuteness. The loyal, unselfish principle of 
duty carries with it a power of revelation. If duty 
is merely a question of circumstances, then every 
new set of circumstances raises a new question 
and a new difficulty. If duty, on the other hand, 
is a matter of absolute obligation under all cir- 
cumstances, then the whole mass of such questions 
and difficulties is disposed of at a blow. In the 
most confused whirl of circumstances, Christ's true 
follower knows his way. 

And Christ's teaching and example in this mat- 
ter are valuable to every age. To none more than 
to this, when the selfish and politic principles of 
the world seem to be pouring like a flood over the 
lines of Christian duty. In an age which tends to 



90 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

moral compromise, this principle which illumined 
Christ's way ought to be sharply defined and em- 
phasized in the consciousness of every Christian. 
If there is a word to be spoken for truth and 
righteousness, even though it recoil upon the man 
who speaks it in abuse, or in social or political or 
religious ostracism, he must none the less speak it ; 
looking not at the recoil, but at the truth and the 
righteousness. If there is a protest to be made by 
example against social looseness and corruption, 
the loyal Christian cannot be in doubt about what 
his duty is, though he may shrink from the hard- 
ness of the duty itself. His way lies straight 
before him. It is an easier way than the path of 
compromise. Almost daily, practical issues arise 
in our lives which bring us face to face with this 
teaching of Christ ; issues where the only light we 
can get will come from a loyal and obedient heart : 
where, the moment we step out of the line of light 
which streams straight from God's Word, we are 
in darkness and confusion. I repeat it: we sim- 
plify life and duty, we clear up and dispose of a 
multitude of hard questions, by taking, as our 
fixed, immutable principle, duty, always and every- 
where. Suppose duty costs reputation, popularity, 
ease, social approval : it is none the less duty for 
that reason. Christ does not mean to save us 
cost. He gives fair warning of that. He does 
not promise that the man who walks in the light 
shall have an easy walk. He promises that he 
shall not stumble : but Christ did not stumble 
because he was crucified ; Stephen did not stumble 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 91 

because he was stoned ; Paul did not stumble be- 
cause he was imprisoned and beheaded. Each of 
the lives over the cross, the stone, the prison, 
walked straight to its goal ; and their track lies out 
in the light as a lesson and a warning to every one 
who would live a true, loyal, faithful life. The 
stumbling begins the moment we let in any other 
consideration than that of duty. Darkness and 
confusion come in with these. The stumbling 
would have been in Christ accepting Satan's offer 
of the kingdoms of the world, in Stephen keeping 
silence ; in Paul making terms with Nero and 
with the Jewish leaders, and saying smooth things 
to the debauchees at Corinth, and to the philoso- 
phers at Athens. If a man adds to his life by 
avoiding the danger that lies in the path of duty, 
that added life is no gain. It has no divine bless- 
ing and no divine guidance. Such life is not 
God's gift: it is filched by him who wins it. 
Reputation, popularity, security, won by evasion 
of duty, are not gains. They shine in a false and 
transient light, and they will soon lapse into dark- 
ness. The light shines steadily to-day over Beth- 
any, — light which gilds the door of every closed 
tomb. Better that Christ should have gone in the 
face of the stones than that the world should have 
missed the lesson of the resurrection and the life. 
The light of all the ages centres in the cross. 
Better all that agony than that the world should 
have missed a Saviour. Better the light and glory 
and honor, in which Christ and his apostles and 
the good and true of all time stand enshrined to- 



92 LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 

day, than if they had shirked the cross and the 
scourge, the prison, and the sneer of the world. 

But remember that this steadfast, light-giving 
principle in the soul is not a matter of mere 
human resolve. As I have often told you, no 
radiant, life-giving life is ever generated by a 
mere code of laws, or by mere strength of resolu- 
tion. Christ is in the soul as an inspiration, and 
not merely before the eye as an example. The 
single heart is formed only by the living contact 
of God's spirit. The single heart is the pure 
heart ; and no amount of resolution, no library of 
moral treatises, no portrait-gallery of holy exam- 
ples, can of themselves purify the heart. That is 
the work of God's transforming spirit alone. 

And once more remember, that though Christ, 
in setting you on that well-lighted track of duty, 
does not allow you to take account of the hardness, 
He takes account of it. He has been over every 
inch of the ground himself : he has felt the rend- 
ing of the thorns, and his feet have been bruised 
by the same stones which bruise yours. You can- 
not live a life so hard that Christ has not lived a 
harder, you cannot make so great a sacrifice that 
Christ has not made a greater. He does not push 
you out on straight lines of hard duty to walk 
alone. He goes before. His word is, "Follow 
me ! " And all along that line he walks close to 
you, even as he promised, when he said, " Lo, I 
am with you alway." Only keep the eye on him, 
follow him anywhere and everywhere, and you 
cannot go wrong : you cannot get into darkness in 



LIGHT AND LOYALTY. 93 

questions of duty. He is a strict but a tender 
master ; and on the way in which he leads you 
are not only crosses and thorns, but light and 
love and sympathy and peace, and, at the end, 
heaven. 

" Deem not that they are blest alone 
Whose lives a peaceful tenor keep ; 
For God, who pities man, has shown 
A blessing for the eyes that weep. 

There is a day of sunny rest 

For every dark and troubled night ; 

Though grief may bide an evening guest, 
Yet joy shall come with early light. 

Nor let the good man's trust depart, 
Though life its common gifts deny, — 

Though with a pierced and broken heart, 
And spurned of men, he goes to die. 

For God has marked each sorrowing day, 

And numbered every secret tear ; 
And heaven's eternal bliss shall pay 

For all his children suffer here." 



VI. 
THE ORDERED STEPS. 



VI. 

THE ORDERED STEPS. 

"The steps of a good man are ordered by the Lord: and he 
delighteth in his way. 

" Though he fall, he shall not he utterly cast down: for the 
Lord upholdeth him with his hand." — Ps. xxxvii. 23, 24. 

THAT first step of your little child, — what an 
event it is ! After the child has grown into a 
strong and hearty boy, his walking does not inter- 
est you in itself, but only in its direction, which 
often menaces his safety or that of your household 
treasures ; but now the single step is a thing of 
profound meaning. One, two, three, — each time 
your eye is on the little foot, and your hand ready 
to catch the tottering form at the first symptom 
of a fall. Never again will single steps have such 
interest for you. And yet why not ? In manhood, 
no less than in infancy, single steps are significant. 
You find it out sometimes in disagreeable ways. 
One step in the dark carries you off firm footing 
into an open trap, or down a bank. The first step 
down a wrong road is the beginning of trouble- 
some, and possibly dangerous, wanderings. The 
first wrong step, — how many men have looked 
down a dismal perspective, and have seen it like 

97 



98 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

a footprint of fire! The first step to honor or 
fortune, — how much meaning it has after the 
honor or the fortune has been won ! 

Now, Scripture holds to the emphasis upon the 
single steps. The word "walk," as you know, is 
constantly used by it to express the course and 
method of a man's life: "Enoch walked with 
God." "Thou shalt keep the commandments of 
the Lord thy God, to walk in his ways." " Walk 
while ye have the light." " See that ye walk cir- 
cumspectly." These are a few instances out of 
scores. Walking is a matter of steps ; and, in God's 
training of men, he directs their attention to the 
single steps rather than to the course of their lives 
as a whole — to the details of the life, in other 
words, rather than to the life at large. This is the 
first truth of our text: Grod orders, arranges, es- 
tablishes, the details of his children's lives. 

There is a practical wisdom in this. We speak 
contemptuously sometimes about a man of details, 
as if he were an inferior sort of man ; but really 
very few of mankind have the ability to grasp 
large masses of work, and succeed only by doing 
work in detail, a piece at a time, each day's duty 
in its day. And the man who can give details over 
to somebody else, and devote himself to the larger 
aspects of his business, is no less dependent upon 
details than before. He is at the top of the ladder, 
but the top rests on what is below. He had to 
climb the steps to the top. 

There is also a profound philosophy in this. 
The principle has a very wide reach. The boy 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 99 

who saves penny after penny in order to make up 
his dollar, is working on a line which goes out 
through all the universe. His little economy is 
an outcome of the great truth that God moves 
masses through details. When the attraction of 
gravitation acts upon that cannon-ball as it flies 
through the air, and gradually draws it to the 
ground, the attraction is exerted, not upon the 
ball as a mass, but upon each separate particle. 
When water, in obedience to its law, flows down 
a steep, the force which draws it down to its level 
acts upon each separate drop. Thus, then, the 
particles of the cannon-ball do not fall to the 
ground because they are included in the mass. 
The particles make the mass, and the mass falls 
because of the force exerted upon the separate 
particles. The drops make up the current. There 
is a current because the attraction draws every 
drop to its level. 

This law of matter is a law of morals, a law of 
providence, a law of divine economy : the greater 
is reached and moved through the less, the mass 
through the detail. Character is an accretion, an 
aggregate. A man is what the details of his life 
are, whether in his business life, his intellectual 
life, or his moral life. He receives great impulses 
in all these spheres, but all these impulses work 
out their result through detail. See the illustra- 
tion of this in the history of Divine Providence as 
we have it in the Bible. One of the most common 
of popular delusions is, that God is always and 
only busied with great things ; and yet in the 



100 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

Bible he is constantly dealing with details. He is 
explaining a servant's dream ; he is providing for 
a little castaway babe in a bulrush basket ; he is 
furnishing water to a thirsty crowd of people ; he 
is dictating a code which goes into every item of 
eating and drinking and cleansing; he is giving 
directions about fringes and embroideries, about 
blue and scarlet curtains, about the patterns of the 
priests' dresses, and the knops and flowers in the 
temple architecture. 

The case is no different when he becomes mani- 
fest in the flesh. Christ's life and work are full 
of detail. Now he is coming out to comfort some 
poor fishermen in their lonely toil, and to fill their 
nets with fish. Now he is caressing little children, 
again noting a poor widow's little coin dropped 
into the treasury, or talking with a wretched wo- 
man by a well, or supplying wine for a wedding, or 
bread and fish for a hungry multitude. 

The same thing appears in Christ's preaching. 
He tells men how to live ; but he says nothing about 
great, far-reaching plans of life. His talk is rather 
of living by the day, and letting the morrow take 
thought for the things of itself. He treats of our 
talk, yet not of our studied discourses and elaborate 
orations ; rather of our ordinary communication, 
our words, our common affirmations and denials : 
and by these he tells us we shall be justified or con- 
demned. He comes to reveal God to us : but his 
speech is not about the God of vast designs and 
transcendent power ; rather of one who paints each 
lily of the fields, and feeds the birds, and marks the 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 101 

sparrow's fall, and numbers the hairs of our heads. 
He teaches men their duty to society : but he says 
nothing of great schemes of beneficence ; rather, 
he cautions us against harming the little ones ; 
bids us visit the sick and the prisoner, and give 
the cup of cold water to the wayfarer ; to speak a 
kind word for an angry one, and to meet the blow 
with forgiveness. And, when he promises reward, 
he sums up the achievements of the best and 
greatest in these words, — " Thou hast been faith- 
ful over a few things." 

Thus you see one law — the law of the steps — 
running through physical and moral nature alike. 
Gravitation and Providence observe the same prin- 
ciple. God regulates the mass through the particles ; 
society, through the individual ; the individual, 
through the details of his life. Men, with their 
joys and sorrows and infirmities, are not carried 
down and swallowed up as single drops in a cur- 
rent. Each individual soul in the great sweeping 
tide of souls, each element in the experience of 
each soul, is the subject of his divine forces. The 
drops determine the tide, the steps determine the 
life ; and the life which is led by him is led step by 
step, and each separate step has its meaning and 
its relation to every other step. We do not see 
this. As life unrolls day by day, the duties appear 
to have so little relation to each other that we 
receive no impression of design or plan. There 
seems to be that absence of design even in the 
Saviour's own words : " The morrow shall be 
anxious for itself." But that is only in appear- 



102 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

ance. The steps of a good man are established ; 
not ordered each day as emergencies arise, but 
pre-arranged. The plan, the pre-arrangement, does 
not appear when you see that laborer laying a 
single course of brick or stone ; but the architect 
sees that course as part of his design. We must 
study history, and especially Bible history, to real- 
ize that life evolves itself according to a plan. 
Look, for instance, at the familiar story of Joseph. 
The plan is plain enough to us now. We see a 
meaning and a mutual relation in all the separate 
events of that history, but Jacob did not see it. 
He said, " All these things are against me ; " while 
we know, and he afterwards found out, that they 
were all for him. To Joseph the pit did not mean 
the place next the throne. The same is true of all 
history. God moves on such long lines that it 
takes a good many centuries, with their countless 
steps of countless men, to work out a design of 
his ; yet that plan bears the footmark of every one 
of those millions, and its lines are only the lines of 
those myriad lives. 

The steps of a good man, then, are ordered. He 
does not walk at random. His life is not a series 
of accidents which some superior power gathers 
up after a while, as a potter might gather the loose 
fragments of clay, and mould them into what he 
could. And really you and I, in our measure, are 
familiar with the same fact, and act it out. You 
see in a son of yours promise of intellectual and 
moral power ; and you set yourself to shape that 
boy's career, and you do shape it, and that by 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 103 

attending to its successive steps. You watch and 
care for every detail of his training, and the boy's 
life bears the mark of your ordering. Is there 
any thing strange in our heavenly Father's ordering 
the steps of his children ? Is not the true reason- 
ing from the less to the greater ? " Sow much 
more shall your heavenly Father give good things 
to them that ask him." 

We talk a great deal of our free choices, our 
independence, our self-determination ; but, if we 
insist on these, we do not come within the Psalm- 
ist's description. It is the steps of a good man that 
are established. I do not say that God has nothing 
to do with the steps of others ; he has very much 
to do with them : but we are not concerned with 
that now. The good man of the Psalmist's 
thought is the man of law, — the man who rec- 
ognizes the excellence and the rightful claim of 
the divine law, and who gives himself up to it. 
The Bible alternative is very sharp and plain. 
Either we are to be ordered by God, or we are to 
be self-ordered. If we undertake to order our own 
steps, we must take the consequences, and relin- 
quish all claim upon God's ordering. I am not 
preaching to you inflexible fate, but obedience to 
divine wisdom; not the passive submission of a 
corpse to a rushing current, but the loving and 
intelligent obedience of a free will. There are 
those who seem to think that obedience is incon- 
sistent with freedom, and that a man shows his 
freedom by revolt against law. They forget that 
a free will may choose to obey another will. If 



104 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

God has prepared tracks for my life ; surely my 
very freedom of choice empowers me to keep to 
those tracks : and, to the obedient, loving soul, 
it is an immense comfort and relief to know 
that his life moves on prepared lines. I sat one 
evening in a window looking out on Charing- 
Cross railway-station, with its trains arriving and 
departing every few minutes, and its cross-tides of 
thronging people. A train stood on the track, 
and the bell rang for starting. In front, through the 
great archways, I looked out into the misty night. 
A few stray gleams of light revealed a labyrinth 
of rails, curving and crossing : above was a signal- 
stand — a great hieroglyph of green, red, and 
white lights, shifting every moment ; and into this 
darkness and confusion the engine moved. What 
was it that made that engineer so quiet and confi- 
dent ? Why was he not disturbed and anxious at 
the chaos of rails and lights and the thick night 
beyond ? Simply because every thing was laid 
down for him. He had only to obey the signals, 
and drive his engine : the track was laid. Other 
minds had the care and responsibility of the 
switches and signal-lights : he had only to go for- 
ward, and to stop when bidden. 

" I do not like the picture," some one will per- 
haps say. " It leaves me little to say about my 
life." Well, change the picture if you will. Let 
the engineer go forth from the station on an en- 
gine not fitted to a track. Let him move out into 
the night, in the consciousness of independence and 
free choice, to avoid collision and wreck as he can. 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 105 

Have you bettered the matter any ? Are you any 
better, any more dignified, any more secure, strik- 
ing out into this selfish world on your own respon- 
sibility, and with only your own wisdom ? Have 
ever so much to say about the ordering of your 
own life, the simple question is, whither your 
ordering will take you. The area of human life 
is marked all over with these tracks of individual 
choice, but unfortunately they are lined with 
wrecks. There are no wrecks along the lines on 
which God orders the steps: "He that walketh 
uprightly walketh surely." " Acknowledge him 
in all thy ways, and he shall direct thy steps." 

The second truth of the text is, that God is 
pleased with him ivho thus lets his steps be ordered. 
Literally the words read, "From Jehovah is 
it that a man's steps are established, so that 
he hath pleasure in his way." This need not 
detain us long. It is self-evident that God is 
pleased to have men walk in the ways which he 
himself ordains ; and his pleasure is not simply in 
the fact that he is obeyed, not merely in receiving 
from men the tribute of respect and submission 
which is his due. We do God a great wrong 
when we picture him as a creditor whose interest 
in his debtors begins and ends with their paying 
their debts. God merges the relation of debtor 
and creditor in that of father and child. It is a 
very small part of your interest in your child, that 
he should repay you for your care of him. In 
fact, payment is impossible. On the contrary, 
every thing the child does or says is interesting to 



106 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

you because he is your child. Other children say 
bright and quaint things, but none of them have 
quite the flavor of those which come from his 
baby lips. And when he begins to walk, you are 
not criticising his walk by the rules of the dan- 
cing-master ; .you are simply delighted in his way, 
rejoiced to see him growing strong and exercising 
his limbs : and so it is all the way up to manhood. 
What he does and says and achieves and suffers 
has the keenest interest for you, because he is your 
child. Now, possibly, we find it hard to transfer 
just that feeling to God ; and yet that is the true 
view of his feeling towards his children. A group 
of statesmen engaged in the discussion of a treaty 
would probably give no thought to the group of 
children playing under the windows of the coun- 
cil-chamber, but God does not look upon men in 
that way. From one point of view we might 
justly think, that all the " windy ways of men " 
— all their rushing up and down, all their hot 
pursuit and all the objects they pursue, all their 
striving and wrangling — are to God just what 
two newsboys playing marbles are to that banker 
as he walks down the street to negotiate a loan of 
millions. And yet " God so loved the world that 
he gave his only begotten Son." It was to just this 
crowd of men and women, with their little ambi- 
tions and their petty strivings, that he looked for 
those whom he should call and justify and glorify, 
conforming them to the image of his Son. And 
therefore God is interested in whatever concerns 
these children. Every step of that life-problem 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 107 

which you and I are working out is noted by him. 
No one has so deep an interest in our working it 
out well. Each undertaking, each acquisition, 
each trial, each conflict, each victory, — he con- 
cerns himself with it; and your fatherly heart 
never beat with more joy at your babe's first step, 
or your boy's first prize in school, than does his at 
each step of ours in the way he has laid down : 
every victory over self and sin, every honest pur- 
pose formed in reliance on him, every forward 
step in self-mastery, reflects glory on him. He 
leadeth his children in the paths of righteousness, 
not for their glory, but for his name's sake. He 
delighteth in their way. 

" Ah ! " you say, " I would fain believe myself a 
child of God. I desire to please him, but my way 
is not perfect. It is sometimes little better than a 
series of stumbles and falls : and, instead of being 
a radiant, strong, white-robed son of God, my gar- 
ments are soiled with the world's dust, and I am 
all bruised and scarred ; and it seems a cruel satire 
to tell me that the Lord delighteth in my way." 

Here, then, the third truth of the text comes 
in. Evidently the Psalmist recognizes infirmity 
as an element of the good maris walk. There is a 
possibility, more than a possibility, of his falling, 
which the text provides for: "Though he fall, 
he shall not be utterly cast down: for the Lord 
upholdeth him with his hand." We may go back 
again to the illustration of the babe's first walk. 
There is none which better suits the case. We 
who call ourselves strong men, who seem to walk 



108 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

so firmly and securely, what is our walk, after all, 
but the tottering walk of little children? And 
yet you do not despise that baby's attempts at 
walking, because he falls over now and then. The 
falls somehow are taken up in the fact of his walk- 
ing : they are a part of it. You do not want him to 
be hurt ; you are sorry for him when he falls ; you 
try to keep him from falling; you take him up 
tenderly, and dry his tears after each fall : and yet, 
clumsy, tearful performance though it is, you de- 
light in his way. You would rather have him fall 
a hundred times, — yes, and hurt himself too, — 
than not have him walk at all. Let us face the 
fact squarely. There is falling along the path by 
which God orders a man's steps. It is not that 
God ordains sin. He does not. But the path 
which God ordains for a good man lies through 
this world : and sin is in the world, no matter why 
or how ; and a good man's walk with God consists 
very largely in a fight with sin. What God 
pledges is not that the man shall escape all con- 
tact with sin in his walk, not that he shall not 
feel the power and bitterness of sin, not that he 
shall walk to heaven a perfect, sinless man all the 
way. The Psalmist prays, "Order my steps in 
thy word : and let not any iniquity have dominion 
over me ; " and, when we turn from the Psalmist 
to Paul, we find the answer to that prayer : " Sin 
shall not have dominion over you, for ye are not 
under the law, but under grace." The promise, 
therefore, does not cover the fight with sin, but 
the victory of sin. Even the man whose steps are 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 109 

ordered of the Lord shall know, and know well, 
the anguish of that fight; but, though Apollyon 
bring him to the ground, he shall stretch forth his 
hand, and grasp his sword, crying, " Rejoice not 
against me, O mine enemy : for when I fall, I shall 
arise ; " and, as he goes on his way scarred but 
victorious, he shall be a living, walking testimony 
to the truth: "The steps of a good man are es- 
tablished by the Lord." Establishment does not 
exclude conflict or fall. It comes about through 
the successive conflicts and falls and risings again. 
You and I never have seen a perfect man, we 
never shall see one : we know enough of men to 
know that those whom we love best, and think 
best, and trust most, have their infirmities and 
their errors ; and yet we are not unfamiliar with 
men who are nobler than their faults. We know 
of something in those men which lies back of all 
their faults, which seems beclouded now and then 
by the dust from their fall, but which, after each 
fall, rises up again through a mist of penitent 
tears, and asserts itself as the dominant power in 
their lives. There is something in the deathless 
persistence of that power, something in its daunt- 
less renewal of the struggle with sin and self, 
which makes us reverence that man more than 
one whose life seems an even-spun thread of recti- 
tude without knot or tangle. One has said of 
David after his moral fall, "He is not what he 
was before, but he is far nobler and greater than 
many a just man who never fell and never re- 
pented." Let us beware of thinking repentance 



110 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

a sentiment of a lower grade, or degrading to the 
man who drops its bitter tears. There is some- 
thing heroic in the man who looks up to God's 
ideal of manhood far, far above him, and at him- 
self, lamed and wonnded by his fall, and says, 
"By God's grace I will monnt to it." There is 
something transparently honest and noble abont 
the man who looks his own shame and infirmity 
in the face, and says to God, " All that thon say- 
est of its vileness is true to the last word. Thou 
art justified when thou speakest, and art clear 
when thou judgest." " Unbelievers," says Carlyle, 
"sneer, and ask, 'Is this your man according to 
God's heart ? ' The sneer, I must needs say, seems 
to me but a shallow one. What are faults, what 
are the outward details of a life, if the inner secret 
of it — the remorse, temptations, the often-baffled, 
never-ending struggle of it — be forgotten, — 
struggle often baffled, sore baffled, driven as into 
entire wreck, yet a struggle never ended, ever 
with tears, repentance, true unconquerable pur- 
pose begun anew." 

So the steps of a good man are established, — 
established in spite of his fall. Walking in the 
way of God's order brings with it that strong, im- 
mortal, unconquerable principle which re-asserts 
itself after every fall, and keeps the man's face 
set toward God, and his feet pressing on along 
the heavenward road. It is a divine principle, 
the very hand of God stretched forth each time 
in fulfilment of the promise : " Though he fall, 
he shall not be utterly cast down : for the Lord 
upholdeth him with his hand." 



THE ORDERED STEPS. Ill 

From these truths we draw some conclusions of 
great practical value : — 

If God has ordained a way for men to walk in, 
it is the height of folly to walk in any other way. 
If a man's steps are established in that way, they 
must be feeble and uncertain, and ending in a dis- 
astrous fall in any other way. If God walks that 
way with his children, establishing their steps, and 
upholding them when they fall, those who walk on 
other roads, walk without his help and strength, 
and therefore walk in danger. Fancied indepen- 
dence, which chooses its own road and walks in its 
own wisdom, is a poor compensation for the surety 
and safety and help vouchsafed to him who com- 
mits his way unto God. 

If God, as we have seen, orders our ways, step 
by step, it becomes us to take heed to the details 
of our lives. If our acts and choices were de- 
tached, if the significance of each one began and 
ended with itself, a single step might be less im- 
portant. But every step is an element of progress 
in one direction or the other. Every act, every 
choice, is a piece which fits into some other piece. 
Every deed is a link in a chain. You shall go, and 
stand beside yonder woman at her embroidery, 
and see her putting in the stitches carelessly, and 
now and then inserting a stitch of the wrong 
color; and, on your calling her attention to the 
fact, she shall say, "No matter, the whole piece 
will be very beautiful when it is done." You 
know it will not, for what is the entire pattern 
but a mass of single stitches? The great outcome 



112 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

of our lives will be shaped by their details. Our 
lives are not what great crises make them. They 
are made by those little words and deeds, those 
daily touches, those successive steps. 

If God orders each detail of our lives, ought we 
not to get great and solid comfort out of the fact ? 
More and more, as it seems to me, his divine dis- 
cipline turns our eyes from the vague future with 
its uncertain results, and fixes them on to-day's 
duty and to-day's privilege. We are distressing 
ourselves, it may be, about the outcome. There 
is no need, if we follow God's rule, which confines 
us to the separate steps. When a traveller in the 
Alps is ascending an ice-slope where he has to cut 
steps as he mounts, he thinks of little besides the 
step he is at that moment cutting. He has a point 
to reach, a space to traverse ; but all that is lost 
sight of in the danger and difficulty which wait on 
every step. He knows he will escape destruction 
only as each step shall be rightly cut, and his foot 
firmly planted each time. It is a good deal so in 
this life. It is not a safe journey by any means ; 
but there is this assurance for a child of God who 
walks it, that each step shall be sure if he only 
commits his way unto the Lord. And while there 
is not much comfort to the man who is cutting his 
way up the ice, there is a great deal for the man 
who will accept this principle as his rule in life, 
and concern himself with his single steps rather 
than with his life in a mass. You say that makes 
your life fragmentary. Very likely. I wonder if 
some of us have not to accept fragmentariness, 



THE ORDERED STEPS. 113 

and make the best of it? You have been balked 
in many of your plans ; and your life, perhaps, has 
been a mere -doing of what came to hand ; and you 
have possibly said, "Life is an utter failure. It 
would not have been so if I could only have 
carried out my plan." Perhaps not. Perhaps it 
would have been a greater failure if you had car- 
ried out your plan. Only, here is Christ, pointing 
down at a little dead sparrow, and saying, " Not 
one of them falleth to the ground without your 
heavenly Father's notice." God looks after frag- 
ments, and works through them to make glorious 
units of his own. 

The separate steps ! Sometimes each one seems 
to sink into a quagmire, or to strike a stone. It 
is hard to walk on in strong faith that they are 
ordered by the Lord. The little cares and vexa- 
tions ! They seem to be interruptions to the course 
of the life. No call for patience or self-control in 
these. And yet suppose these are the very things 
which go to make up the course of the life. Sup- 
pose you wake up by and by to find that you 
have cast away the blessing which lay hidden in 
an annoyance. So, then, to conclude, it becomes 
us to fall in with God's order, and to attach to the 
separate steps the same importance that he does. If 
we do, we shall never think slightingly of any act or 
word. We shall acquire a new sense of the value 
of each single soul, and shall cease to view men in 
masses. We shall be led to develop the resources 
of single points of effort. We shall find more joy 
and success in our daily lives, and in our worries 



114 THE ORDERED STEPS. 

and disappointments, and amid the temptations to 
feel that we are carried helpless and uncared for 
in the mighty sweep of time and change, we shall 
tnrn back to the old psalm, and say, " My steps are 
ordered of the Lord ; he delighteth in my way ; 
he npholdeth me with his hand ; and if he be for 
me, who can be against me ? " 



VII. 

FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 



VII. 

FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

"His Lord said unto him, "Well done, good and faithful ser- 
vant: thou hast been faithful over a few things, I will set thee 
over many things : enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." — Matt. 
xxv. 21. 

THERE are three great elements of work in 
the kingdom of God, — quantity, quality, and 
ability. 1 Quality is a matter of character ; ability, 
of endowment ; quantity, of improvement. When 
we sit down before an artist's picture, we con- 
sider his skill as a draughtsman and colorist, and 
the power of his mind to evolve ideas. These 
represent his ability. We consider the character 
of his picture, the lesson it teaches, — whether it 
awakens pure and high thoughts, or base and sen- 
sual ones ; whether it is true to the great laws of 
art. These represent quality. And then we sum 
up the result, and ask how much of a picture the 
artist with his degree of ability has made. What 
rank will it take ? Is it a great picture, or a poor 
picture ? The answer to that is quantity. 

How do these three stand related to each other 

1 I am indebted in this introduction to Professor Alexander B. 
Bruce's admirable work on The Parabolic Teaching of Christ. 

117 



118 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

in Christian work and reward ? For what is reward 
given in the kingdom of God, — for ability, quanti- 
ty, or quality ? Here we may profitably study this 
familiar parable of the talents, in connection with 
the parable of the pounds in the nineteenth of 
Luke. These two are not the same. Each treats 
the truth from a different point of view. In the 
parable of the pounds, we are taught that equal 
ability implies equal quantity, and that, when abil- 
ity is equal, quantity determines merit, and, there- 
fore, that unequal quantity is unequally rewarded. 
The master gave his ten servants a pound apiece. 
The endowment was equal, the outcome was 
unequal. One returned ten pounds for his one; 
another, only five for his one. The first received 
authority over ten cities, and was, besides, addressed 
as a good and faithful servant. The other received 
only five cities, and not a word was said about his 
goodness or fidelity. 

Turning now to our parable of the talents, we 
find that the endowment, the ability, of the several 
servants, was not equal. It is represented by the 
difference between five, two, and one. As in the 
parable of the pounds, we have a varied quantity 
in the returns, represented by five, two, and zero. 
But in the award we notice that the difference 
between five and two is wiped out or ignored; 
and that the same reward is given to the servant 
who brought two for two, as to him who brought 
five for five. Here, then, it appears that quantity 
does not enter into the question of award. The 
same award is given for different quantities; so 



FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 119 

that we need a third factor in order to determine 
the principle of this judgment. That third factor 
is quality, and quality is fixed by the proportion 
of quantity to ability; in other words, by the 
answer to the question, Did the servant do all he 
could with his endowment ? Were two talents all 
the interest of which his capital admitted with the 
most faithful and diligent use? The award in 
this parable, then, is based, not on the differences 
between the returns, but upon the fact common to 
both returns, that ability had been worked at its 
highest power, and had yielded the most and best 
of which it was capable ; that both alike bore the 
stamp of faithfulness. To both servants it is said, 
" Thou hast been faithful ; " to both, therefore, 
" Enter thou into the joy of thy Lord." Faithful- 
ness imparts the quality which answers God's test 
of moral value ; and value and award in the king- 
dom of God turn upon quality, and not upon 
quantity. Faithfulness spans the differences of 
ability. No difference of endowment can put one 
out of reach of that test. It follows endowment 
down to its vanishing-point, and binds the possessor 
of an infinitesimal fraction of a talent to raise his 
fraction to the highest power as stringently as 
it binds the holder of five or ten talents. The 
servant with the smallest capital was condemned 
simply because he did not use it. On the other 
hand, endowment never rises out of the atmos- 
phere of faithfulness. No measure of ability ever 
exempts from duty. No amount of brilliancy 
compensates for unfaithfulness. 



120 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

Let us now look at a few of the details of the 
parable which illustrate this principle. Observe, 
first, that all human endowment and its largest re- 
sults are small, measured by the standards of God's 
kingdom. To the holder of the five talents, as to 
the holder of the two, it is said, " Thou hast been 
faithful over a few things.'" Human endowment 
and human performance, the few things, get their 
significance from their relation to the many things, 
— the great, thronging facts and principles and 
laws of the kingdom of God. The most persistent 
and varied activity and the largest achievement of 
the greatest man are but small, in themselves con- 
sidered ; but they are points where the vast econ- 
omy of the kingdom of God — that something which 
is vaguely indicated by " many things," " the joy 
of the Lord," — emerges into the region of our 
human life, and touches it. That which is out of 
sight is more and greater than that which pushes 
out into our view. That point of rock which rises 
out of the hillside is, to the geologist, not merely a 
distinct stone. It tells him the dip and quality of 
the great strata under ground which buttress the 
hills. Obedience, responsibility, duty, work, love, 
trust, — all that makes up Christian life here, — 
are sides and manifestations of the unseen, spirit- 
ual universe. Godliness has promise, not only of 
the life that now is, but of that which is to come, 
— has the promise which one part of a thing gives 
of the other part. Godliness is a part of the life 
to come. Godliness is God revealing himself in 
human character. Follow back godliness, and you 






FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 121 

come to God. The boy who is learning his alpha- 
bet is handling the same elements which enter 
into the plays of Shakspeare or the dialogues of 
Plato. He has begun upon literature when he has 
learned ABC. It is a little thing in itself for 
him to learn twenty-six letters, but it is a very 
great thing when you consider the alphabet as the 
medium of the world's thought. Even so, I re- 
peat, the largest endowment and the largest result 
are shown by this utterance of Christ to be but as 
" a few things," but acquiring, nevertheless, a tre- 
mendous and eternal importance as integral parts 
of the great moral economy of God. The man 
who is administering a moral trust, discharging 
duties, improving gifts, is within the circumfer- 
ence of that kingdom which spans eternity and 
the universe ; and it is that fact which gives mean- 
ing and value to his few things. 

This appears further as we consider a second 
feature of the parable. Work and accomplishment, 
in themselves, are trivial, because they do not involve 
mastery. Look at our Lord's words : " Good ser- 
vant, thou hast been faithful over a few things, I 
will set thee over many things." The word is habit- 
ually used of putting in a position of authority or 
mastery. Good and faithful people are constantly 
tempted to identify success with accomplishment, 
and to think that they fail because they cannot 
do what they set out to do. But you observe that 
God gives no promise of mastery for this world. 
God is not nearly so much concerned that you and 
I should accomplish what we purpose as that the 



122 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

quality of our work should be heavenly. Hence 
it is that he sets upon true and good work, not 
the seal of accomplishment, which is a thing of to- 
day, but the great moral seal of the eternal heav- 
enly kingdom, which is faithfulness. This, and not 
accomplishment, is what determines its real value. 
It is a fact of observation, that good men do not 
always, nor perhaps often, carry out their plans. 
Often their plans are larger than their lives ; often 
their plans are weaker than their circumstances : 
and these facts tend to irritate and depress them. 
They do not see that these temporary failures may 
lie on the direct line of a delayed success. The 
greatest success in life is to maintain fidelity, — to 
be faithful, though the outcome be only a few 
things. The man who has a great reform to carry 
through, a great truth to lodge in the convictions 
of society, has not necessarily failed if he die 
with society unreformed and unconvinced. He 
has failed if he has given up trying, if he has lost 
faith in the truth, if he has let down his ideal. 
That is disastrous failure. One thing which we 
are slow in learning is, that the best human work 
is fractional. The divine whole is greater than 
any one man, or than any one man's work. We 
of this age are carrying out something which our 
fathers left incomplete, and we in our time shall 
leave something for our children to carry out. 
" Other men labored," says our Lord, " and ye 
have entered into their labors." Abraham filled 
his place grandly ; he was the father of the faith- 
ful: but the divine economy of faith was not 






FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 123 

completed in Abraham. Paul was needed to 
supplement Abraham, and the saints of the nine- 
teenth century to supplement Paul ; and the men 
of faith of the twentieth century will supplement 
those of the nineteenth, and add something to the 
outcome of their life and work. The men of the 
past, so the writer to the Hebrews tells us, "had 
witness borne to them through their faith ; " but 
he says also that " they received not the promise." 
Faith did not issue in full fruition. God " prom- 
ised a better thing for us, that they should not be 
made perfect apart from us." In other words, we 
are necessary to their perfection. Their work, 
their moral ideals are carried on and developed by 
us, and so the development goes on from century 
to century. Therefore, human work, Christian 
work, does not issue in mastery here. Even the 
few things may be too much for the servant. The 
mastery comes only by way of reward. 

And yet the parable very clearly shows us that 
faithfulness is on the direct line of mastery : " Thou 
hast been faithful, therefore I will make thee 
ruler." Fidelity tends and leads up to mastery. 
Success is a thing of stages and aggregations ; 
and it is of vastly more consequence that the 
man should be rightly pointed, set in the direc- 
tion of a larger, divine success, than that he should 
achieve what he undertakes here. If there is no lar- 
ger, purer, more spiritual kingdom than this, there 
is no such thing as real success. If there is such 
a kingdom, and if the earthly sphere of Christian 
life and work is a part of it, then the success may 



124 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

well lie beyond the line of our human vision, and 
be too large for our little inch-rules. The great 
principle holds, — fidelity leads up to mastery. 
You see it illustrated daily. You see the faith- 
ful journeyman advanced to the foremanship, the 
plodding student become an authority : you see 
men of moderate ability becoming powers in busi- 
ness or in manufacturing, by steady devotion to 
one thing. The thing itself may be small ; their 
perseverance magnifies it: and they themselves 
grow into the ability to handle larger things 
through their fidelity to the smaller interest. 

We notice again, that fidelity to the few things 
carries with it the promise of fidelity to the many : 
"I will set thee over many things." In that 
promise, you observe, not power, but confidence, 
is emphasized. The idea of a trust is carried up 
from the lower to the higher plane. Delegated 
authority is a trust no less than delegated duty. 
All through the New Testament, Christ insists 
that endowment means, first of all, responsibility. 
Rule is trust. The man who cannot be trusted 
is the man who must not rule. 

Now, the popular idea is, that moral responsi- 
bility is concerned mostly with great things. But 
keep in mind the truth we have been illustrating, 
and which lies at the root of this parable, — that all 
human action gets its quality and meaning from 
its relation to the kingdom of God. From this 
point of view no act is insignificant, no neglect 
safe, no violation of trust trivial. Christ strikes 
at the root of the popular error. Fidelity has 



FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 125 

nothing whatever to do with the magnitude of the 
trust. That truth is written in black lines on the 
moral history of humanity. The story of Eden, 
whatever else it may teach, asserts God's insistence 
on fidelity to a small trust. The conditions im- 
posed on our first parents were not complicated 
nor burdensome : they were but to let one tree 
alone. That simple condition they did not meet. 
Put in trust with the tree of knowledge, they 
betra}^ed their trust: and is it too much to say 
that the loyalty which could not bear so small a 
strain was a feeble sentiment ? that this little act 
of eating a fruit showed the man's unfitness for a 
dominion founded in loyalty to God quite as deci- 
sively as a greater and noisier act would have done ? 
Let us beware of flattering ourselves that we will 
be loyal to God in great issues, even though we may 
not be in smaller ones. The moral quality which 
determines the smaller issue will determine the 
greater one. Our Lord leaves us in no doubt on 
this point : " He that is faithful in a very little is 
faithful also in much : and he that is unrighteous 
in a very little is unrighteous also in much ; " and 
that is the principle which you frankly accept in 
your dealings with men. Unfaithfulness in the 
smallest work, in the lowest sphere, is no recom- 
mendation for promotion. You do not choose for 
foreman of your establishment the man who has 
been doing slovenly work in a lower place. If 
your clerk has stolen a dime, you will not make 
him your cashier. It is not a question of quantity, 
but of quality. You do not consider how much he 



126 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

stole, but that he stole. It is quite enough for you 
to know that he will steal, and the dime brings 
out the fact quite as well as a thousand dollars. 
In the kingdom of God, nothing is small, nothing 
is insignificant. The few things take their char- 
acter from the many things; the talents are of 
a piece with the joy of the Lord ; the pounds 
and the cities are under one economy. If the 
joy and the cities are great and significant things, 
they make the single talents great and signifi- 
cant. 

We cannot insist too much on the truth that no 
act or thought of ours stands by itself. We say, 
" This is a little transgression, or a little omission ; " 
but we forget how the thing may be magnified by 
its connections. The handle of the throttle-valve 
on that locomotive is a small piece of iron, much 
smaller than the pistons or the driving-wheels; 
and that reckless lad climbing upon the engine 
might say, " This piece of iron is so small that it 
will not matter if I pull it ; " but, at the first touch, 
the steam hisses, and the wheels begin to revolve, 
and he is carried helplessly down the track. Our 
contact in this world is not with whole things. 
We touch extremities, or sides of them ; and how 
far back the things themselves run, how many 
branchings and connections they have, we do not 
and can not know. The neglect or the fault which 
we call little may be as the end of a slow match 
connecting with a magazine. No matter how 
little, how few, the things we have to deal with, 
fidelity is the only insurance. 



FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 127 

Hence, the Bible emphasizes small trusts. The 
tragedy of this parable, and a terrible one it is, 
centres in the servant who had but one talent. 
The smaller your trust, the less your ability, the 
greater is the call for care and watchfulness, be- 
cause a peculiar temptation attaches to small 
endowment. 1 There is not even a plausible excuse 
for neglecting a great trust ; but it is one of the 
commonest of things for people to neglect their 
gifts, and let them run to waste because they are 
small. You notice, that, in the parable, the man 
with the one talent is the only one of the three 
who is represented as under temptation to neglect. 
If your boy has a present of ten dollars, he is easily 
persuaded to put it by as the nucleus of a hundred. 
It is not hard for him to see that it is a good piece 
of a hundred. But if he has a quarter of a dollar, 
he will say, " I may as well spend that." He does 
not see that the quarter is part of the hundred as 
well as the ten. The quarter has just as real and 
definite a relation to the hundred as the ten. Even 
so, the commonplace man, the man who thinks he 
does not count, the small talent, the scant power 
to speak or act or plan, — have just as real and 
just as definite a relation to the great economy of 
the kingdom of God as the most brilliant array 
of gifts. That fact of itself settles the question of 
duty. That fact of itself enjoins faithfulness. That 
fact of itself justifies God in rebuking and punish- 
ing the servant who hides his single talent in a 

1 See Drummond's Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 



128 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

napkin. It has been well said, that, " It is just the 
men whose capital seems small who need to choose 
the best investment. It is those who belong to 
the rank and file of life who need this warning 
most." 

Once more, observe that the parable fixes our 
attention less upon the work than upon the worker ; 
or, perhaps we might better say, upon the work 
through the worker. As we have said, the lesson 
turns on the question of quality; and the qual- 
ity, faithfulness, is imparted by the servant. The 
satisfaction of the master lies, not in the fact 
that his five talents have grown into ten, but 
in that the increase is due to his servant's faith- 
fulness. In God's eyes, the best and highest 
result of work is a good worker. I think, that, 
in our ordinary interpretations of this parable, 
we are in some danger of overlooking this, and 
of laying the emphasis on the development of 
power rather than on the development of char- 
acter. We say, "The servant made the best of 
his power, and the result was correspondingly 
large." We draw the practical lesson, " The more 
faithfully you use your talents, the more you will 
accomplish." We perhaps tend to forget that it 
is the moral quality of the user that gives char- 
acter to the result ; that a smaller result, as the 
outcome of faithfulness, is more in God's eyes 
than a larger one without it ; that to God there 
is no large result, no good result, without faithful- 
ness ; that God demands interest on character no 
less than on endowment, and that interest on 



FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 129 

endowment counts for nothing without interest on 
character ; that quality fixes the rate of interest 
on quantity. We may go into the other world 
with the reputation of great or brilliant or efficient 
men. It will count for nothing if we are not also 
good men. But it is also true that the servant's 
faithfulness sets its own mark upon his work, and 
gives all results a new and higher character. An 
engineer puts some pounds of dynamite into a 
mountain, and blasts open a tunnel. It is a great 
result, but it is a mere material result. We all 
know what dynamite can do, and we think only of 
a powerful material agent overcoming a given 
resistance. But, when a Washington has con- 
quered freedom for his country, it is more than a 
matter of cannon and musketry. It is a matter 
of moral ideas, of holy passion and patriotism 
and self-devotion and fidelity to a few things, 
and courage and loyalty — all set their mark upon 
armies and battles and munitions and glorify 
them. These fearful material forces, with their 
ghastly results, are lifted into the moral sphere. 
In the library of a well-known gentleman of wealth 
and culture and large social influence, might be 
seen, enclosed in a glass case, a common brick. It 
told the story of his first step in life. He was a 
journeyman bricklayer, and that was the first 
brick he ever laid ; and, from the eminence of his 
fame and fortune, he had gone back to the old 
house where he began his career of faithful indus- 
try, and had brought back its first result. Only 
an ordinary brick, like millions of others : but you 



130 FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 

do not need to be told what it was that made it 
more than a common mass of clay, that made it a 
symbol of faithfulness ; that took that common- 
place thing, and brought it into harmony with all 
that environment of culture and refinement and 
religion, and made it seem not out of place in the 
company of books and pictures and statues, and 
that linked it with an honorable manhood spent in 
the service of God and humanity. Faithfulness 
brings out strange relationships between things 
apparently most remote, between the material and 
the spiritual, between the few things and the joy 
of the Lord. Faithfulness alone glorifies power. 

Thus, this parable turns on moral quality rather 
than on ability. Its keynote is not five talents, 
nor two talents, nor one talent, but faithfulness to 
all three. It is faithfulness, and not amount, which 
links the talent to the joy of the Lord, the few 
things to the many. The amount of ability is not 
the first thing for you and me to consider : it is 
the faithful use of whatever ability we have. To 
use aright, we must be right. Vigorous use of 
talent is not necessarily right use, for unfaithful- 
ness is vigorous also. Whatever legitimate joy 
shall ever come to a servant from his talents, will 
come through the Master's word : " Well done, good 
and faithful servant." Beware of despising any 
talent, however small. It comes to you out of 
heaven. It is God's trust to you. It is linked 
with the great economy of the kingdom of God by 
lines which your eye cannot follow. You cannot 
prophesy a small result from its neglect on the 



FIDELITY AND DOMINION. 131 

ground that it is a small talent. God turns you 
persistently away from the question of quantity 
or amount, and fastens your eyes on one para- 
mount fact — faithfulness. You have but a few 
things, but one talent ; none the less he says, " Be 
faithful." You will do well to study the fate of 
him who neglected his single talent. 

I am reminded of more than one illustration of 
faithful service and inherited joy as I call up the 
faces which have vanished from these familiar 
scenes of worship, and especially this morning, as 
my eye rests on yonder beautiful memorial of a 
beautiful and faithful life, 1 the gift of bereaved 
love to this church, which shared so largely in the 
rich ministries of that life. The life itself, it is 
true, needs no visible reminder to perpetuate its 
power and memory. It has left its abiding record 
and its abiding influence in your hearts and on 
your church-work. It glows there with richer hues 
than those through which God's sunlight streams 
to-day ; but none the less the memorial will serve 
through many coming years to point the lesson of 
to-day, as the sunlight shall bring out the name of 
a good and faithful servant, who, through simple 
faithfulness, brought full interest out of large en- 
dowment, and, having laid it all at the foot of the 
cross, entered into the joy of her Lord. 

1 A memorial window placed on the north side of the Church 
of the Covenant to the memory of Mrs. Nancy McKeen Lewis 
by her husband, Dr. Charlton T. Lewis. 



VIII. 

EXTRA SERVICE. 



VIII. 
EXTRA SERVICE. 

" But who is there of you having a servant ploughing or keep- 
ing sheep, that will say unto him, when he is come in from the 
field, Come straightway and sit down to meat ; and will not 
rather say unto him, Make ready wherewith I may sup, and 
gird thyself, and serve me, till I have eaten and drunken ; and 
afterward thou shalt eat and drink ? Doth he thank the ser- 
vant because he did the things that were commanded ? Even 
so ye also, when ye shall have done all the things that are com- 
manded you, say, We are unprofitable servants ; we have done 
that which it was our duty to do." — Luke xvii. 7-10. 

ARE these indeed the words of Him who said, 
"Henceforth I call you not servants, but 
friends " ? This is a picture of a hard, unlovely 
side of life, — a slave's life and a slave's service, 
without thanks or claim for thanks. A slave has 
been ploughing or keeping sheep all day. He has 
done his full day's work, and is tired and hungry ; 
but, when he comes back to the house, he finds that 
his work is not done yet. He cannot sit down, and 
refresh himself : he must wait upon the master at 
his meal first. After that he may sit down. Doe^ 
the master give him any thanks for his service at the 
table — his extra service above his day's ploughing 
or shepherding? Not so, indeed, says our Lord. 
The slave is his own; he has a right to his ser- 

135 



136 EXTRA SERVICE. 

vice anywhere and everywhere, in hours or out of 
hours. Even so, he continues, when ye, servants 
of God, have done all that is commanded you, 
say, " We are unprofitable servants ; we have only 
done our duty; we have no title to thanks or 
reward, no matter how hard we work." 

We ask, I repeat, and not unnaturally, where 
such a representation of Christian service fits into 
that sweet and attractive ideal which Christ else- 
where gives us under the figure of the family rela- 
tion, — sons of God, confidential friends of Christ. 
Does this picture of slavish service, hard duty, and 
no thanks belong to these ? 

We hasten to say, No ; but it will require a little 
study to discover why we may say no, and to fix 
the place of this parable in relation to others of a 
happier tone. 

In the first place, you observe that it is not un- 
usual for our Lord to draw a disagreeable picture 
in order to set forth his own love and grace. What 
a type of hard, selfish cruelty is that unjust judge, 
for example : "I will hear the widow, in order to 
be rid of her. I will do what she asks me because 
she troubles me, and for fear that she may weary 
me to death." Is this like God ? No. If the un- 
just judge can be moved by earnest and persistent 
appeal, shall not the just God be moved by the cry 
of his own chosen ones ? Or, to take another case, 
is God like the churlish man who refuses to give 
his neighbor bread because the door is shut, and 
he is in bed ? Nay, if the churlish neighbor will 
yield to importunity, and rise, and give his friend 



EXTRA SERVICE. 137 

as many loaves as he needs, will not God honor the 
importunate faith which besieges his doors, even 
though, to test it, he delays for a while ? His delay 
is only the prelude to his rising, and giving like a 
God. 

We must not be repelled by a figure, therefore. 
But, then, there are the words, " even so ye also," 
which compel us to recognize in this parable some 
features of our relation to God. The parable does 
not say that God deals with his servants as a mas- 
ter does with a slave, yet it may nevertheless ex- 
press some facts and conditions of Christian service. 
Let us try to see what these are. 

The parable answers to the fact in being a pic- 
ture of hard work, and of what we call extra work. 
The servant is all day at the plough or in the pas- 
ture, and after a full day's work has the extra duty 
of serving at table, without regard to his own 
hunger or weariness. The service of God's king- 
dom is laborious service, — service crowded with 
work and burdens. Christ nowhere represents it 
as easy. When Christ says his yoke is easy, he 
does not mean that there is no pressure from it, 
and that it is borne without labor. The word 
" easy " is, rather, " good," " wholesome," " profit- 
able." Daily experience shows us that the high- 
est Christian service involves the most labor, and 
it also reveals that feature of Christian service to 
which this parable calls our attention, — the ele- 
ment of extra service, service not limited by times 
and measures. Its calls come at all times. The 
master appears at midnight, at morning, or at 



138 EXTRA SERVICE. 

cockcrow. The servant is to be always ready, 
with his loins girded. No Christian can shut him- 
self up to a little routine of duty, and say, I will 
do so much, within such times, and no more. 
When a flower stands out in the open field, with 
its great rich petals outspread to the sun, it is not 
visited only by certain bees which come at stated 
hours to suck its sweetness. These come, indeed, 
and fly away loaded with sweets ; but the dragon- 
fly wheels round it with his gauzy wings, the 
humming-bird thrusts his beak into its crimson 
cup, the spider fastens his web on the stalk, and 
swarms of busy flies light upon the petals. Its 
perfume and its honey are common property. So, 
when a Christian stands in the field of Christian 
service, his heart open to God's call, his life dis- 
tilling the perfume of holy love, he cannot keep 
his services upon one line or within certain times. 
Demands for ministry swarm over the lines he may 
have drawn ; outstretched hands are thrust forth 
from unsuspected corners ; voices arise from places 
given over to silence ; his hands are always full. 
If he begins with a scheme of duties and times, the 
feeble hands of sickness and want will throw his 
scheme into confusion, or keep him constantly en- 
larging it. Take the life of Paul, and see if you 
can compress it within any lines of routine, or 
measure out its labors, so much per day, or its rest, 
so many hours out of the twenty-four. Or look 
at the life of our Lord, how it abounds in this ele- 
ment of work out of season ! It was the hour of 
rest when he sat at Jacob's well, and we are ex- 



EXTRA SERVICE. 139 

pressly told that he was weary; yet with what 
ardor he threw himself into the interview with the 
Samaritan woman. So, when from sheer exhaus- 
tion he had fallen asleep in the fishers' boat, he 
must rise at the call of the frightened disciples, 
and quiet the sea and their terror. If he went 
across the lake to seek for rest, the multitude took 
shipping, and followed him. When evening fell, 
he must feed the five thousand to whom he had 
been speaking. Wherever he walks, some man or 
woman with a sick child beseeches his aid, some 
blind man or cripple cries, " Have mercy on me ! " 
if he sits at meat, some outcast comes, and appeals 
to his pity. 

And this is not peculiar to Christian service. It 
is a law of all work of a higher type, that it over- 
steps mere methodical limits. It is only work of 
a mechanical kind that is confined to specific times 
and prescribed duties. The nearer you get to 
machine work, the more this characteristic asserts 
itself. The machine turns round just so many 
times in a minute ; a cog raises a lever just so often : 
there are no surprises about a steam-engine or a 
mowing-machine ; we know exactly what they can 
do in a given time : and, the lower the type of 
work, the more of the machine character it takes 
on — so many hours for so much ; just such a re- 
sult for so many pounds of steam. You often hear 
it said of this or that man, " he is a mere machine : 
he simply obeys specific orders at given times." 
The man who makes the fires and sweeps the office 
of that statesman comes at a certain hour in the 



140 EXTRA SERVICE. 

morning, does his round of duties, and goes away ; 
comes again at a given hour, feeds the fires, and 
goes away again. Nothing more is asked or expect- 
ed of him. There is nothing in him or in his work 
which carries it over these lines; but the states- 
man cannot work in that way. To-day a consulta- 
tion breaks into his routine, a state paper keeps 
him at his desk until far into the night ; to-morrow 
a cabinet-meeting or a debate takes out a great 
piece of his time. I have heard a man in this city 
remark, that, if his regular routine work — which 
most people would think quite enough — were all 
he had to do, he should feel quite like a man of 
leisure. The outside irregular work had assumed 
such proportions as almost to dwarf the regular 
duties. So long as a man's work is merely the 
carrying out of another's orders, it will tend to be 
mechanical and methodical: but the moment the 
man becomes identified in spirit with his work ; the 
moment the work becomes the evolution of an idea, 
the expression of a definite and cherished purpose ; 
the moment it becomes the instrument of individ- 
ual will, sympathy, affection ; above all, the moment 
it takes on the character of a passion or an enthusi- 
asm, — that moment it overleaps mechanical tram- 
mels. The lawyer is not counting the number of 
hours which duty compels him to work. He would 
make each day forty-eight hours long if he could. 
He has a case to gain, and that is all he thinks 
of. The physician who should refuse to answer a 
summons from his bed at the dead of night, or to 
visit a patient after a certain hour of the day, 



EXTRA SERVICE. 141 

would soon have abundance of leisure. Pain will 
not measure its intervals by the clock, fever will 
not suspend its burning heats to give the weary 
watcher rest: the affliction of the fatherless and 
widow knocks at the doors of pure and undefiled 
religion at untimely hours. Times and seasons, in 
short, must be swallowed up in the purpose of 
saving life and relieving misery. 

I need not carry the illustrations farther. You 
see that the lower a type of service, the more 
mechanical and methodical it is; and that the 
higher types of service develop a certain exuber- 
ance, and refuse to be limited by times and sea- 
sons. 

A second point at which the fact answers to the 
parable, is the matter of wages ; that is to say, the 
slave and the servant of Christ have neither of 
them any right to thanks or compensation. What 
God may do for his servants out of his own free 
grace and love, what privileges he may grant his 
friends, is another question ; but, on the hard busi- 
ness basis of value received, the servant of God 
has no case. What he does in God's service it is 
his duty to do. The Romish doctrine of works of 
supererogation — special services or sacrifices mer- 
iting special compensation — has no warrant in 
Scripture. The man's largest services, those which 
take most from his legitimate leisure and rest, go 
into the general reckoning as duty. In reading 
the parable, put the emphasis on the word servants. 
We are unprofitable servants. As servants we can 
render no service that is not due. In the eleventh 



142 EXTRA SERVICE. 

of Romans we read, " who hath first given to him 
(God), and it shall be recompensed unto him 
again ? " " God," as Bengel remarks, " can do with- 
out our usefulness." God has no necessary men. 
" Doth he thank the servant because he did the 
things that were commanded? I trow not. Even 
so ye also, when ye shall have done all the things 
that are commanded you, say, We are unprofitable 
servants ; we have done that which it was our duty 
to do." 

Now, then, we reach the pith of the parable. It 
is spoken from the slave's point of view, it deals 
with service of the lower, mechanical type ; and 
you find the key to it in the master's command to 
the slave to do an additional service at his table, 
after he has already completed a full day's work. 
Our Lord treats the subject from this lower point 
of view, that he may warn us away from that type 
of service, and direct us to a nobler one, in which 
that which appears to the slave as extra service 
ceases to be regarded as such, and is taken cheer- 
fully into the larger and more generous conception 
of duty as part and parcel of it. It is only the 
servile, mechanical worker, in other words, to 
whom extra service has any existence. In Christ's 
real friends, the desire for service outruns the abil- 
ity. Just as the lawyer and doctor regard their 
unexpected calls and the infringements on their 
hours of refreshment or rest as features of 
their work, never thinking of them as imposi- 
tions or extra burdens; so the Christian's high- 
est conception of service includes all the calls 



EXTRA SERVICE. 143 

to the ministry which lies outside any scheme of 
labor and rest. This exuberance of work, this 
constant "finding of the hand" interjected into 
the daily routine, this working "double tides," 
this bearing another's and yet another's burden 
beside his own, — all fall under the accepted law 
of his life. To a man who accepts this view of 
Christian service, the parable is not addressed. It 
has no application to him. He is working on a 
different and a higher basis. The point of impulse 
is shifted from a mere schedule of duties to his 
own sympathy with Christ's purposes. Behind 
service is the trust of a masterful enthusiasm, and 
not the stricture of a time-table. Overflow is its 
law. Service on the lower plane of our parable is 
like that waterfall in the Catskills, shut in by a 
floodgate, and made to play to order. It is a thing 
of regulated quantities and intervals. Service on 
the higher plane is like Niagara, with the pressure 
of deep, exhaustless Erie crowding it onward with- 
out rest. It cuts tracks for itself, it spreads out 
round the green islands, it boils through the nar- 
row canals, it leaps and races in rapids towards 
the final plunge, and its mist and thunder arise 
forever. You might as well attempt to concen- 
trate Niagara upon a single millwheel as to keep 
the Christ-like impulse to service within the lines 
of mechanical routine, and of stated times and 
seasons. That service is as exuberant and varied 
as it is constant. No jealous floodgates shut down 
between it and opportunity. Christ's friend does 
not fence off from the claims of service a section 



144 EXTRA SERVICE. 

of rights to rest and leisure. He would as soon 
think of forbidding his neighbor to enter his own 
house or orchard. He is not his own ; his heritage 
is not his ; his life is a practical assent to the truth 
which Paul so forcibly puts to the Corinthians : 
" Ye are God's tilled land : ye are God's building." 
And therefore God's claims have the free and full 
range of his time and of his powers. 

I would that there were more of this rich, spon- 
taneous overflow in the Christian life of to-day. 
We may not look for the luxuriance of the South- 
American forest under our colder skies. Our trees 
and shrubs are cleaner in outline and less lavish in 
foliage and flower ; but our piety need not be sub- 
ject to any such physical law. The sun of right- 
eousness does not shine obliquely on any part of 
God's heritage, and we might well have more trop- 
ical exuberance in our religious life. I know that 
enthusiasm, is not necessarily boisterous or demon- 
strative. The deepest enthusiasm, like deep water, 
is often the stillest. But when a man is full of 
true enthusiasm, it will out, though he seldom open 
his lips. I remember that they used to have in 
houses what they called an air-tight stove. It was 
shut up on all sides. You could not see a spark 
of fire, but you felt it. It was all through the 
atmosphere of the room. If you touched it, you 
found there was fire in it; and once in a while 
it would get red-hot, and show fire. If there is 
fire, God 's fire, in a man's soul, it may not sparkle 
nor roar, but it will make society feel it some- 
how. I am thankful for all the methodical, well- 



EXTRA SERVICE. 145 

systematized work of religious societies and of the 
church ; it is doing good. But I wish we could 
have these methodical lines set on fire. I wish 
there were more glow in our church-life. As I 
go about among people, I do not find them any 
too ready to speak of Christ and of his work. I 
go into house after house, and I hear all sorts of 
subjects talked about, but little of the church of 
Christ, its interests, and its work. Mere order is 
cold, rigid, and lifeless. You know how, one night 
in each year, the dome and front of St. Peter's 
at Rome are illuminated. All over the great 
curves of the dome, and along the columns and 
mouldings and balconies, the lines of lamps are 
drawn ; but what a ghastly sight is this skeleton 
of lamps until, at the signal, every line of the 
mighty structure, from cross to foundation, leaps 
into living light ! So it will be with our mechani- 
cal duties, our well-organized societies, our forms 
of worship, yea, our creeds and catechisms, unless 
the Spirit of Pentecost shall touch and set them 
ablaze. Oh, that there might come, as in Ezekiel's 
vision, the heavenly messenger, with hand filled 
with the coals of fire from between the cherubim, 
kindling all our hearts, and setting every line of 
our church-order aglow with heavenly love ! Some- 
times this rigid order, tins systematic and punc- 
tilious distribution of duty, goes with a worldly 
half-heartedness, which metes out so much to 
Christ and his work, and says he shall have this, 
— so much time, so much money, — but he must not 
trench on my hours of rest and leisure. He must 



146 EXTRA SERVICE. 

keep liis hands from what I set aside for my indul- 
gences and pleasures. When I have ploughed so 
many hours in the field, it is my right to sit down 
to meat, and be served. I must not be asked to 
gird myself, and serve him. 

And the moment a man puts himself on that 
lower ground, and begins to measure out his times 
and degrees of service, and to reckon what is due 
to himself, that moment he runs sharply against 
this parable. That moment Christ meets his as- 
sertion of his rights with this unlovely picture. 
The parable says to him, in effect, "If you put 
the matter on the business basis, on the ground of 
your rights and merits, I meet you on that ground, 
and challenge you to make good your claim. I 
made you : I redeemed you, body and soul, with 
my own blood. Every thing you have or are, you 
owe to my free grace. What are your rights? 
What are your claims on me? What is your 
ground for refusing any claim I may see fit to 
make upon you ? What claim have you for 
thanks for any service you may render me at any 
time?" And the man cannot complain of this 
answer. It is indeed the master's answer to a 
slave ; but then, the man has put himself on the 
slave's ground. The other kind of servant, as I 
have said, has gotten out of the way of this para- 
ble. He raises no question of rights, claims, or 
wages. His thought is only of his master's rights. 
His kind of service involves more labor, and is met 
by gifts, not wages. That is the service of the 
widow who dropped her two mites into the treas- 



EXTRA SERVICE. 147 

ury. The world would have justified her in hold- 
ing back her last penny. Christ himself would 
not have been hard with her: but love gave its 
last and its best ; and not the mites, but the love, 
has made her immortal. It is the service of her 
who poured the ointment on Christ's head. Even 
to the disciples, the gift seemed like waste. Less 
would have sufficed ; but love's impulse could not 
rest until the flask was broken, and the whole pre- 
cious contents bestowed on that adorable head : 
and hence it is, that, whenever this gospel is 
preached, the story of that woman's love is told. 

And, on this higher basis of service, Christ's 
disciple meets with another class of sayings, quite 
different from this parable, — sayings which put 
him in a nearer and nobler relation to Christ, and 
which lift his work entirely out of the region of 
moral serfdom. Christ says to such, " Henceforth 
I call you not servants ; for the servant knoweth 
not what his Lord doeth : but I have called you 
friends ; for all things which I have received of my 
Father I have delivered unto you." To the servile 
spirit, Christ asserts his masterdom. He has no 
word of thanks for the grumbling slave who 
grudges the service at his table after the day's 
ploughing ; but to the loving disciple, — the friend 
to whom his service is joy and reward enough, and 
who puts self and all its belongings at his disposal, 
— it is strange, wondrous strange, but true, never- 
theless, that Christ somehow slips into the servant's 
place. Strange, I repeat ; but here is Christ's own 
word for it : " Let your loins be girded about, and 



148 EXTRA SERVICE. 

your lights burning." Here is a picture of night- 
work, you see. "And ye yourselves like unto 
men that wait for their lord, when he will return 
from the wedding; that when he cometh and 
knocketh, they may open unto him immediately." 
Here are the servants, weary, no doubt, with the 
day's work, but waiting and watching far into the 
hours of rest for their master, and flying with 
cheerful readiness to the door at his first knock. 
What then ? " Blessed are those servants, whom 
the master when he cometh shall find watching : 
verily I say unto you, that he shall gird himself, 
and make them to sit down to meat, and will come 
forth and serve them" The amount of the matter 
is, that for him who gives himself without reserve 
to Christ's service, Christ puts himself at his ser- 
vice. When he accepts Christ's right over him 
with his whole heart, not as a sentence to servi- 
tude, but as his dearest privilege, counting it above 
all price to be bought and owned by such a mas- 
ter, he finds himself a possessor as well as a posses- 
sion : " All things are yours, and ye are Christ's." 
The things which master the slave are mastered 
by the friend. Fidelity is mastery. " Thou hast 
been faithful over a few things, I will make thee 
ruler over many things." Life, with its vicissitudes, 
instead of a burden to crush the man, or a current 
to carry him helplessly down, becomes his seat of 
power; all its chances and changes marshalled 
upon God's lines, and made to minister to spiritual 
power and peace and to future glory. " Death is 
yours." How wonderful ! The king of terrors, 



EXTRA SERVICE. 149 

who resistlessly siezes and carries away whom he 
will, is no more master but servant, standing hum- 
bled and chained as porter at the gate through 
which you pass to the court of the King Eternal. 
"Things present," — Christ's touch makes you 
master of them. They are yours, You are mas- 
ter of each day's trials and burdens. You mount 
on them a step nearer heaven, instead of being 
driven by them as with a whip of scorpions. 
"Things to come," — they trouble the servile 
heart. His outlook is dark. They cannot trouble 
him to whom Christ says, " I go to prepare a place 
for you, and I will come again, and receive you 
unto myself; that where I am, there ye may be 
also." 

The two lines of service are before us. Which 
shall we choose ? Wretched is he whom the Lord 
calls unprofitable servant. Happy he who calls 
himself so. 



IX. 

THE PRIDE OF CARE. 



IX. 

THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

" Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, 
that he may exalt you in due time ; 

"Casting all your anxiety upon him, because he careth for 
you." — 1 Peter v. 6, 7. 

A MAN, digging among ruins, strikes a tile of 
an exquisite pattern. Its design seems com- 
plete in itself. He admires the graceful lines and 
the charming color, carries away his prize, and 
shows it with delight to his friends ; but, when he 
goes back to the mine, behold ! the workmen have 
laid bare a broad surface paved with similar tiles, 
and he finds that his specimen is only a fragment 
of a larger pattern. If he thought it beautiful by 
itself, how much more beautiful it is as a part of 
the larger design. 

So it is with Scripture. Single texts it fur- 
nishes in multitudes, full of beauty, power, and 
comfort. But Scripture hangs together. It is a 
unit, and every text gains by being studied in its 
connections. The last verse of this passage, for 
example, is almost always quoted by itself : " Cast- 
ing all your anxiety upon him, because he careth 
for you;" and, standing thus alone, it is full of 

153 



154 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

blessed meaning and consolation ; and yet, by 
separating it from the preceding verse, we lose a 
whole side of its teaching, and a very important 
side. 

Nevertheless, it is not, perhaps, evident at once 
where these two verses fit into each other, — hum- 
ble yourselves, and cast your anxiety on God. 
How does care demand humility? 

The two parts of the text, taken together, state 
this truth : that anxiety carries with it a division 
of faith between God and self, — a lack of faith 
in God, proportioned to the amount of care which 
we refuse to cast on him ; an excess of self-confi- 
dence, proportioned to the amount which we insist 
on bearing ourselves. If we refuse to let God 
carry for us what he desires and offers to carry, 
pride is at the bottom of the refusal. Therefore, 
the apostle says, " Humble yourselves under God's 
mighty hand. Confess the weakness of your hand. 
Do not try to carry the anxiety with your weak 
hand. Cast it all on him. Believe that he cares 
for you, and be humbly willing that he should 
care for you." 

The revised version has brought out a very 
important distinction by the substitution of " anx- 
iety "for "care." Anxiety, according to its deri- 
vation, is that which distracts and racks the mind, 
and answers better to the original word, which sig- 
nifies a dividing thing, something which distracts 
the heart, and separates it from God. The word 
"careth" on the other hand, used of God ("he 
careth for you "), is a different word in the origi- 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 155 

nal, and means supervising and fostering care, lov- 
ing interest, such care as a father has for a child. 
I want to show how the spirit which refuses to give 
up its dividing anxiety to God is allied to pride, 
and unbecoming a child in the household of a 
divine Father who cares for him. 

Our Lord's Sermon on the Mount lays great 
stress on this. Over against the natural tendency 
to fear and disquietude, it sets the loving care of 
an almighty Father. He feeds and shelters the 
birds ; he adorns the flowers ; he is more ready to 
bless his children than earthly parents are to give 
good gifts to theirs. Meat, drink, raiment, — the 
man says he cannot live without them. " True," 
says Christ, " God knows that quite as well as you 
do. Your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have 
need of all these things. The surest way to have 
them is to trust in him. These things are included 
in his kingdom. Seek that, and all these things 
shall be added." 

Yet men will say, and very plausibly, " The anx- 
ious man has some excuse." Take, for instance, 
a man in a position where many are depending on 
him for guidance or instruction, and where great 
interests are bound up with his success. It will 
be said, " It would be strange if he were not anx- 
ious." From the world's ordinary point of view, 
I should say so too. At any rate, he too often is 
anxious, careworn, living in a feverish scramble to 
overtake his work, haunted by the arrears of work. 
You honor his conscientiousness. So do I. You 
say it is unjust to find fault with him. I reply, 



156 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

God finds fault with him, even while he honors 
his diligence and fidelity, — finds fault with him 
because he will not cast off his anxiety on God, 
who has offered to relieve him of it. Is that unjust 
on the part of our Father ? If so, you are guilty 
of similar injustice. Your little son is taken sick, 
and is unable to prepare his lesson for to-morrow's 
school. He is worried and disappointed; he is 
anxious to excel ; he is high up in his class, and 
wants to keep his place. You say to him, " Dis- 
miss all care about that. I will make it right with 
the teacher." And you have a right to expect 
that the boy will be satisfied with that ; that he 
will take you at your word, and trouble himself 
no more about the lesson. And if, in the course 
of an hour, you find him worrying about it, are 
you not annoyed, and displeased with him ? Do 
you not say to him, "You ought to have more 
confidence in me " ? 

Pride, I say, — subtle, unconscious pride,— is at 
the bottom of much of this restlessness and worry. 
The man has come to think himself too important, 
to feel that the burden is on his shoulders only ; 
and that, if he stands from under, there must be a 
crash. And, just to the degree in which that feel- 
ing has mastered him, his thought and faith have 
become divided from God. Let us give him his 
due. It is not for his own ease or reputation that 
he has been caring. It is for his work. And yet 
he has measurably forgotten, that, if his work be 
of God, God is as much interested in his success 
as he himself can be ; and that God will carry on 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 157 

his own work, no matter how many workmen he 
buries. He divides the burden, and shows whom 
he trusts most by taking the larger part himself, 
when God bids him cast it all on him. God, in- 
deed, exempts nobody from work. We may cast 
our anxiety, but not our work, on him. A sense of 
responsibility is a brace to manhood, and a devel- 
oper of power ; and, because God wants work and 
responsibility to re-act healthfully on men, he wants 
them to work with a hearty, joyous spirit. When 
the joy and the enthusiasm have gone out of work, 
something is wrong. There is a pithy proverb 
that "not work, but worry, kills men." God is 
providing for man's doing his work most efficiently 
when he offers him the means of doing it joyfully 
by casting all anxiety on him. 

There are few men in responsible positions who 
have not felt the force of a distinguished English- 
man's words : " I divide my work into three parts. 
One part I do, one part goes undone, and the 
third part does itself." That third part which 
does itself is a very expressive hint as to the need- 
lessness of our fretting about at least one-third of 
our work, besides giving a little puncture to our 
self-conceit by showing, that, to one-third of our 
work, we are not quite as necessary as we had 
thought ourselves. And as to the third, which 
the God-fearing man cannot do, and which there- 
fore goes, or seems to go, undone, there is a further 
hint that possibly that third is better undone, or 
is better done in some other way and by some 
other man. That does not flatter our pride. I am 



158 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

very sure that it is always true for every faithful 
Christian worker, that whatever he cannot do, 
after having done his best, it is better that he 
should not do. And just there is where the 
humility comes in, — in the frank and cheerful 
acceptance of the fact, in casting all care about 
it on the Lord, and in not worrying and growing 
irritated over it. Says a modern preacher, "I 
love to work, but I have carried all my life long 
a sense that the work was so vast that no man, I 
did not care who he was, could do more than a 
very little ; that he who could raise up children 
from the stones to Abraham, could raise up men 
when he had a mind to, and men of the right kind, 
and put them in the right place ; that, after all, 
the Lord was greater than the work, and that it 
was of no use for me to fret myself, and set myself 
up to be wiser than Providence. All I was called 
upon to do was to work up to the measure of my 
wisdom and strength, and to be willing to go 
wherever God sent me ; and that then I was to 
be content." 

A good deal of our energy is expended in plan- 
ning; and, when our plan is once made, we set 
our life on that track, and it runs with an ever- 
increasing momentum. We do not relish a col- 
lision or a delay. Insensibly we fall into the way 
of assuming that success in life means simply the 
success of our plan. Do we bethink ourselves, 
that, if our plan is best in God's eyes, he is as much 
interested in carrying it out as we are ? If it is 
not best in his eyes, surely we do not want it car- 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 159 

ried out. Either way we may safely and restfully 
leave it with God. If we are determined to carry 
it out anyway, and are irritated at obstacles and 
delays, is that any thing but pride ? Are we so 
sure our plan is right, so proud of our pet project, 
that we must torment ourselves if God does not 
pet and foster it as we do ? Oh, how afraid we 
are that our poor earthen vessels will go to pieces ! 
Possibly we have forgotten how God once defeated 
his people's enemies by means of the breaking of 
vessels. What fools those three hundred of Gideon 
would have been if their attention had been ab- 
sorbed in keeping their pitchers unbroken; and 
especially if, at the command to break the pitchers, 
they had said, " What a shame to spoil so much 
good earthenware ! " They would have saved 
their pitchers, but would have lost their victory. 
A pitcher for a victory, a plan for a success, fine 
strategy on paper for conquest, — a poor exchange, 
surely. 

It is right for us to make plans ; but we ought to 
draw them as we draw the first draught of a plan 
for a new house, in lines that can be easily rubbed 
out if God so please. Pride gets into these plans 
before we know it. We think we want God's 
work to succeed, and so we do ; only, we want it 
to succeed in our way, and on the line of our plan. 
And yet not seldom God brings about the very 
result we are working for, by breaking our plan 
all to pieces. Then comes the test of our humility. 
Are we content to cast the whole matter on God, 
and to look cheerfully on the fragments of our 



160 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

plan ? Are we humble enough not to feel grieved 
or angry because God chooses somebody or some- 
thing else to do the same work ? Sometimes God 
lets us see how much better the work is done by 
the breaking of our plan. The forty years among 
the mountain solitudes seemed to Moses, perhaps, 
lost time ; but that slow, tedious ripening gave 
Israel a leader and a law-giver. The next forty 
years yielded rich interest on the sad monotony 
of the previous forty. It seemed to Jacob that 
every thing was against him when Joseph was 
stolen away. He could not see that Joseph had 
been sent to prepare a home for his old age, and 
to lay the foundations of a nation which should bear 
his name. It seemed as though the church could 
not spare Paul when he was shut up in prison, 
but the church of to-day has the four epistles of 
the imprisonment from that chained hand. 

A young lady had consecrated herself to the 
work of missions, and was about to go to India. 
Just at that point, an accident disabled her mother, 
and the journey had to be deferred. For three 
years she ministered at that bedside, until the 
mother died, leaving as her last request that she 
should go and visit her sick sister in the far West. 
She went, intending to sail for India immediately 
on her return ; but she found the sister dying with 
comsumption, and without proper attendance : and 
once more she waited until the end came. Again 
her face was turned eastward, when the sister's 
husband died, and five little orphans had no soul 
on earth to care for them but herself. " No more 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 161 

projects for going to the heathen," she wrote. 
" This lonely household is my mission." Fifteen 
years she devoted to her young charge ; and, in her 
forty-fifth year, God showed her why be had held 
her back from India, as she laid her hand in bless- 
ing on the heads of three of them ere they sailed 
as missionaries to the same land to which, twenty 
years before, she had proposed to go. Her broken 
plan had been replaced by a larger and a better 
one. One could not go, but three went in her 
stead : a good interest for twenty years. 

But there is a class of cases where anxiety 
is clearly prompted by self-interest, vanity, and 
worldly ambition. Self cannot cast such anxiety 
on God, because God will not take it. When God 
bids us humble ourselves, he surely will not minis- 
ter to our pride. He will not stretch out a finger 
to lighten the burdens of sensitive vanity, or to 
save pride from a fall. If you are aiming, for 
instance, merely to make a show in society, with- 
out regard to solid worth or usefulness ; if you are 
harassed with care in keeping up your sham, and 
with fear lest some one may see through it, — you 
dare not cast that care on God. You know very 
well, that, if you put such a thing as that into his 
hand, he will break it to pieces. So you will have 
to carry that burden all alone, if you insist on 
carrying it. You know that if you cast your care 
on God, you will have to humble yourself ; and to 
be humbled is the very thing you are most afraid 
of. If you are making such mad haste to be rich 
that all the sweetness. has gone out of your life, if 



162 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

you are in hot pursuit of the superfluities of this 
world, and are leaving behind you in the chase 
Christian charity and Christian duty and Christian 
worship, do you think God is going to lighten your 
burdens so that you can go faster after your end ? 
Nay, I challenge you to cast that care on God. 
You will not do it. You know that God has no 
sympathy with it. If you will convert yourself 
into a coining-press, you need not expect God to 
help it run smoothly when your faith and your 
domestic affection, and all your best possibilities, 
are run into dollars. It is hard enough work, as 
you know, — harder and drier than God would have 
chosen for you ; but you must do it alone. Care 
which will not humble itself under his hand, he 
will not touch. It is not an easy thing that the 
text urges. If it were merely to throw off trouble 
of all kinds on God, that might not be so hard. 
But God does not hold out his arms to our bar- 
dens unconditionally : he is willing to take the 
burden on his hand, if we ourselves will come and 
stay under his hand, not otherwise. He refuses 
to take the care without the self. If we will put 
the self into his hand absolutely, he will take it, 
care and all. But many an one would like to 
cast the care on God, and keep the self in his own 
hand. The text does not mean merely the laying 
down of ivearied heads on a fatherly arm, but the 
voluntary stooping of proud heads. Casting all 
our care on God is casting self on God, for self is 
our worst care. It is not merely coming to God 
with our failures, and asking him to make them 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 163 

good, but it is confessing also that our unaided 
self is the worst failure of all, and saying frankly 
to our heavenly Father, " Without thee I can do 
nothing." 

God has different ways of teaching this lesson. 
You know how a schoolmaster will sometimes shut 
himself up with a dull pupil, and hold him down 
to a problem. So God sometimes shuts a man up 
with himself and his own helplessness. Even 
then he does not force the man's will; but he 
means that he shall for once look squarely at the 
impotence of self, that he shall for once face and 
confess to himself the fact that self has exhausted 
its resources, that the world cannot help him, 
that he has nothing in heaven or earth but God. 
That, as men see it, is a terrible blow to pride. The 
bitterest draught that ever a man is called on to 
drink is the confession that he cannot help himself. 
The world says, a man is at his worst then. I am 
not sure of that. The Bible would say that he is 
just within reach of his best. I heard a little story 
the other day, which was very suggestive. An old 
Scotch woman was on a steamer in the Northern 
Atlantic, and was in a continual worry lest there 
should be a storm. The wind and the sea began 
to rise ; and she besieged the captain with questions 
about the probabilities of disaster, until, becoming 
a little impatient, he solemnly said, " Well, madam, 
I think we shall have to trust in the Lord." 
" Oh ! " cried she, " has it come to that? " It is the 
simple, spontaneous utterance of human unbelief, 
when it is thrown on God alone. Has it come to 



164 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

that? Then, indeed, we are in evil case. Paul 
did not think so, however. He was in that situa- 
tion during most of his life ; and he really seemed 
to think that the situation was not only not hope- 
less, but commanding : " If God be for us, who 
can be against us ? " There was Elijah. God 
drove him into the wilderness, where, for any 
thing he could do, he must perish. But he did 
not perish. God made the ravens his purveyors, 
and caused the brook to flow for his refreshment. 
Then the brook dried up. He had no water, but 
he had God; and, at the critical moment, came 
God's word : " Go to Zarephath ; I have commis- 
sioned a widow to feed thee." She was at the 
gate when the prophet came, but the prospect was 
not encouraging. She was gathering sticks to 
bake her last handful of meal, and there was a 
son to take the small share which the prophet 
might have had; and what mother's heart could 
hesitate between her child and a stranger ? Eli- 
jah might have trusted the evidence of his senses, 
and have despaired, instead of casting all care for 
the matter on God ; but he can even ask the fam- 
ishing mother to bring him the first share of the 
wretched repast, knowing that the barrel and 
the cruse were in the hand of Him who maketh 
the valleys stand thick with corn, and the face of 
His people to shine though the labor of the olive 
fail. There were those three Hebrews. Look 
into the blazing mouth of that seven-fold heated 
furnace, and at those three men lying bound, and 
tell me what is there for them but death. They 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 165 

needed no mocking king nor courtiers to tell them 
they could not help themselves. Self and all were 
in God's hands. The case could not be worse as 
men saw it ; and yet, in fact, the case was at its 
best. They had nothing but God ; but they had 
in God the best that man or angel could have: 
the flame burned their bonds, but not them ; and 
they rose, and walked in the fire ; and the amazed 
spectators saw a fourth walking with them, and 
his form was like unto the Son of God. 

But let us give a moment to the latter part of 
the text. The result of this humbling of self, and 
throwing it with its anxiety on God, is quite con- 
trary to human logic. The world says, the man 
who is humbled is the crushed man, the defeated 
man. The world is right, if the man is simply 
crushed into submission by overwhelming power ; 
but the world is quite wrong if the man has vol- 
untarily bowed the high head of his pride, and 
has cheerfully yielded up his will with his care 
to God. Such humbling, if Scripture is to be 
believed, is the way to exaltation : " He that hum- 
bleth himself shall be exalted." You see some- 
thing of the same kind in ordinary matters. Now 
and then you find a man with more conceit than 
ability, with more self-confidence than resources, 
who attempts to lead a great movement, or to 
conduct a great business ; and the very position 
brings out his weakness ; and the longer he stays 
in it, the more useless and dangerous he is, and 
the more men say he is a fool and a weakling. 
And yet not a few men have had the sense or the 



166 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

grace to see the true state of the ease in time, and 
to swallow pride, and frankly to confess weakness 
by retiring from a place for which they were un- 
fit. From that moment they began to rise. They 
never rose to the high position which they coveted 
at first, but they rose to a true position, which 
they could hold ; and that was really higher than 
the false position which they could not hold. 
They became respectable and useful men, doing 
good work in lower places, and winning esteem 
and honor ; while, if they had held on to the 
higher place, as pride prompted, they would have 
won simply contempt and impotence. What is 
true in some cases in society is true always of 
men in relation to God. The man is always in a 
false position, a position he cannot fill, when he 
ignores God, and tries to take care of himself. 
He is a larger man, a better man, a more efficient 
man, by humbling himself under God's hand, and 
letting God take care of him. He escapes, I re- 
peat, his worst, most consuming anxiety, by escap- 
ing from self. In humbling himself under God's 
hand, care slips off with self ; and surely a man is 
in a better condition to rise when he is lightened 
of his anxiety : he is in lighter marching-order. 
All other things being equal, he does better and 
more effective work when he works joyously. 
There is a good deal of good, solid work, I know, 
done by men who work under pressure, and with 
much burden of care. Sometimes, as I look at 
such, I am reminded of Dante's vision of those 
who toiled along their gloomy way, with head and 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 167 

shoulders bent under the weight of leaden cloaks. 
The leaden cloaks are not for children of God and 
believers in Christ: "My yoke is easy, and my 
burden is light." We shall have true exaltation, 
lighter hearts, better work done, more mastery 
over the world, less sensitiveness to the shocks of 
time and change, —by humbly putting our lives 
into God's hands. While we hold by self, we hold 
by care. The self which we fondly think is our 
buoy is really the weight which is sinking us. We 
lay to circumstances and to providences much 
that is really the outcome of nothing but our 
pride. 

And note another thing : the exaltation prom- 
ised here will not come at once : " He shall exalt 
you in due timer This pride of self is a stubborn 
thing, and will not yield without a struggle ; and 
you may depend that God will bring us sooner or 
later to a definite issue and a hard fight with self. 
We shall have to face the question, whether we 
will trust self, and live in constant irritation and 
fear because our own plans have come short or 
our own efforts have failed, or because we have 
not won the position or the gains we had marked 
out ; or whether we will cut the whole matter short 
by saying, " I am in God's hands : let him give me 
and do with me as seemeth good to him." That 
issue, I say, we have to fight through : there is no 
going round it. We are like ships in an ice-pack. 
There is clear and deep water beyond ; but there is 
no reaching it except by breaking through and 
settling the question, whether we will trust self, or 



168 THE PRIDE OF CARE. 

God. We may stay if we will, and let the ice of 
pride and self-will draw closer until it freezes out 
the life of God in us. We may, with God's help, 
work through into the clear water, and set sail, 
and look back with triumph as we see the bristling 
mass of cares lying like a dark cloud on the far 
horizon : " He shall exalt you in due time." Read 
on a little farther in this same chapter, and you 
find that thought again : " The God of all grace, 
who hath called us unto his eternal glory by Christ 
Jesus, after that ye have suffered a while, make 
you perfect, stablish, strengthen, settle you." Ah ! 
that is exaltation indeed : security, steadfastness, 
mastery over that which burdens the world, peace 
which the world cannot give nor take away. 

If there are any of us here so burdened with 
anxiety that it has pressed nearly all the sweetness 
out of life, let us consider. Perhaps we think 
ourselves subjects for compassion. We may be ; 
but let us look, and see if we may not be subjects 
for repentance. 

Possibly we cannot cast off care because we will 
not cast off pride. Lay the whole burden of care 
on God, if with it you will lay self. Ask yourself 
if you are willing to be any thing or nothing, as 
God pleases. Only work hard, do your best, con- 
secrate your work with prayer ; and then feel that 
you may be restful and quiet, and leave every 
thing with God. 

So with the care which comes about your growth 
in grace, comes out of the stubbornness of sin, 
comes out of your feeling that you make such 



THE PRIDE OF CARE. 169 

little headway in the fight with evil. Christ came 
that you might lay your sin on him. Because of 
your weakness, he shall lead you to the rock which 
is higher than you. He bids you do full justice to 
his tenderness, and prove his mercy. Yes, — 

" There's a wideness in God's mercy 
Like the wideness of the sea : 
There's a kindness in his justice 
Which is more than liberty. 

There is plentiful redemption 
In the blood that has been shed ■: 
There is joy for all the members 
In the sorrows of their head. 

For the love of God is broader 
Than the measure of man's mind, 
And the heart of the Eternal 
Is most wonderfully kind. 

If our love were but more simple, 
We should take him at his word ; 
And our lives would be all sunshine 
In the sweetness of our Lord." 



X. 

THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 



X. 
THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

" But Jesus said unto him, No man, having put his hand to the 
plough, and looking tack, is fit for the kingdom of God." — Luke 
ix. 62. 

IF yon can dismiss from your minds the figure 
of the modern farmer, with his polished plough- 
share leaving the deep, clean furrow in its wake, 
and put in its place the figure out of which Jesus 
made this little picture, — the Eastern ploughman 
doubled over the pointed stick which serves as a 
plough, — you will see at once how vividly the 
absurdity of a man's ploughing and looking be- 
hind him at the same time would have impressed 
Christ's hearers. Even a modern ploughman, 
with the best modern plough, will make sad work 
if he do not keep his eyes straight before him. 
Anyway, that is true of ploughing which is true 
of any other kind of work. One whose interest 
is half in front and half behind him will be only 
a half-way man in any thing to which he may set 
his hand. All good work requires concentration. 
No good work is done into which a man does not 
throw himself wholly. 

This picture of a slouching ploughman is the 

173 



174 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

form into which our Lord throws the lesson of to- 
day, — a lesson which is not confined to the text, 
but which runs through the entire section, from 
the fifty-seventh verse to the end of the chapter. 

What this lesson is, will appear as we briefly 
review the contents of the section. Our Lord was 
about to take his final departure from Galilee. As 
he walked, a man approached him. Luke says, " a 
certain man ; " and Matthew says he was a " scribe." 
However that may be, he was, like so many others, 
moved powerfully by the words and works and 
personal magnetism of Christ ; and he conceived a 
desire to become one of his followers. Accord- 
ingly he volunteered his services : " I will follow 
thee whithersoever thou goest." I think some of 
us, at least, have begun to see what a very serious 
proposal that was. It is no light matter to com- 
mit one's self to follow such a master as Christ 
whithersoever he may go, for the shrewdest man 
can never predict what direction Christ will take. 
The most sincere and self-consecrated man will 
always have an element of surprise in his walk 
after Christ ; for the simple reason, that Christ will 
lead him in God's ways and in God's kingdom, 
which is full of surprises, and where he will find 
out, if he did not realize it before, that God's ways 
are not his ways. 

Evidently no such thought as this had occurred 
to this enthusiastic volunteer. If it had, he might 
have hesitated. Peter, Christ's own disciple, after 
a long acquaintance with the Lord, and knowing 
that he was going to prison and to judgment, said 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 175 

very much the same thing as this person ; but his 
enthusiasm oozed out by the time he reached the 
court of the judgment-hall ; and he staid behind, 
and denied his Lord. This man had conceived of 
no difficulty in the case, — at least, of none which 
he was not persuaded of his own ability to sur- 
mount. 

Christ loves enthusiasm, even if it is not wise. 
Calculation sometimes takes the breath out of 
enthusiasm. That young man who came to him, 
asking, " What shall I do that I may inherit eter- 
nal life ?" had not counted the cost. Yet Jesus 
loved him. Christ is drawn to the man who is 
kindled by him. Even the unintelligent impulse 
of him who does not count the cost, is in the right 
direction. That enthusiasm is an invaluable ele- 
ment of Christian power if it can only be somehow 
perpetuated in a life of steady service and self- 
denial. If it can be wedded to solid conviction 
and settled purpose, it will carry every thing before 
it. 

Nevertheless, our Lord will not let a man enter 
his service without a full knowledge of its 
conditions. The man shall never have it to say 
that he was entrapped into sacrifices and labors 
upon which he did not count. You will all recall 
our Saviour's words about the building of a house, 
and the going out to war without counting the 
cost ; and the same thing comes out in his reply to 
this volunteer : " Follow me if you will ; only re- 
member that, in taking my part, you take the part 
of one who does not fare as well as the foxes or 



176 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

the birds — the part of a wandering, homeless 
man, with no definite position. The foxes have 
holes, and the birds have nests, but the Son of 
man hath not where to lay his head. If you come 
with me, you identify yourself with my lot, and 
share the hardness of my life." Nothing more is 
told us. The account of that interview stops 
short ; and the natural inference, I think, would be, 
that the man's enthusiasm was arrested all of a 
sudden by the revelation of such a possibility as 
this. It was a delightful and inspiring thing, no 
doubt, to be identified with a man who could 
speak such words and do such works as Jesus did ; 
but then, the foxes and the birds ! No : he must 
at least think further of the matter ; and so we 
hear no more of our enthusiastic volunteer. 

The next man, Jesus addresses with his familiar 
invitation, " Follow me." He, too, is a ready man, 
kindled like the first ; but he is naturally a more 
cautious man. Christ seeks all men ; but some men 
go half-way to meet him, others make him go the 
whole way. This man is ready enough, only he 
has a filial duty to perform first. His father is 
dead, and he would pay the respect which a son 
owes in such a case ; and no one would be more 
ready than Christ to acknowledge the force of 
such a claim. But this case was peculiar. It is 
more a representative case than we are wont to 
think, — representative, I mean, of one of those 
decisive crises when a man is brought to a choice 
between two courses, either of which is to give 
character to his whole life. Going after Christ 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM 177 

was a different thing from going after anybody- 
else. He might attach himself to any party-leader, 
or to a side of any temporary movement, and, as 
to the rest of his life, go on in the ordinary course ; 
and he might withdraw from such connections at 
pleasure. But this was a moral issue. To decide 
for or against Christ was to choose an economy of 
life. Crises of that kind come to men outside of 
the religious sphere. When a community, in the 
old colonial days, was suddenly attacked by the 
Indians, every man must drop every thing else, and 
go out to repel the savages. He must leave his 
team unyoked in the field, his plough in the furrow, 
his sick wife in the house, his dead child or father 
unburied, and seize his gun, and take his place in 
the ranks. You are to remember, further, that this 
was the man's only chance to attach himself to 
Jesus. The Lord, as we have said, was going 
forth from Galilee to return no more. According 
to the Jewish law, the pollution from the presence 
of a dead body lasted seven days. By that time 
the man's first enthusiasm would have become 
chilled, and Jesus would be out of reach. The 
man evidently thought that it was only a question 
of a little delay in following Christ : Jesus knew 
that it was a question of following him now or 
never. 

Then comes a third. He offers himself also ; 
but he, too, is not ready to go at once. He wants 
to go home, and take leave of his family and 
friends. And in this case, as in the last, Christ 
assumes that there is a moral crisis. He must de- 



178 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

cide promptly ; and, if he decides to follow Christ, 
he must promptly forsake all, once for all, and fol- 
low him. Let him go back to his house, and the 
tears and remonstrances of friends and kindred 
would shake his resolution. They would say, " At 
any rate, if you must go, do not go to-day : let us 
have one more family gathering. Let us once 
more sit down to our table together. Go the 
rounds once more, and say good-by to this and 
that friend." He never would have gone after 
Jesus. Christ says to him, in effect, " If you go 
after me, the course is straightforward. You must 
give up every thing for me ; take me in place of 
every thing ; give me your whole heart : and, if 
part of your heart is left behind with friends and 
home and old associations, it is of no use for you 
to go. You are not fit for the kingdom of God, 
any more than a man is fit to plough a field who 
is constantly turning from his plough and his team 
to look backward. 

By this time you have caught the lesson of the 
text. It is the lesson of committal, — the truth, 
that, to follow Christ is to commit one's self wholly 
and irrevocably to Christ. 

And, before we go farther, observe what Christ 
means here by the phrase " fit for the kingdom of 
God." He does not mean that the wavering, half- 
hearted, half-committed man shall not get his 
reward in heaven ; though that is true. The king- 
dom of God is not a matter of heaven only. The 
man enters the kingdom of God from the moment 
that he engages to follow Christ, or, to carry out 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 179 

the figure of the text, from the moment that he 
enters his plough. God has a kingdom on earth 
as well as in heaven, and the sphere of that king- 
dom is the sphere of Christ's service. One is 
here under substantially the same moral laws as 
those which prevail in heaven : so that the ques- 
tion of fitness for the kingdom of God which 
Christ raises is not a question merely of one's fit- 
ness for heaven by and by ; it is also a question of 
fitness to live the life, and to meet the require- 
ments of the kingdom of God, here and now. We 
are to follow Christ here. The field is the world, 
and our ploughing is to-day's duty. The kingdom 
of God involves laws which are to be obeyed here, 
sacrifices which are to be made here, now, to-day, 
and every day. The kingdom of God is already 
set up in the earth, and has a work to do in the 
world. The question is, whether you and I are 
fit to do it ; and Christ here tells us that we are 
not fit for it unless we are wholly committed to 
him. 

Again, let me call your attention to the figure 
in which the truth is set. A man cannot plough, 
and be looking behind him half the time. Such 
a man is not fit for a ploughman. You say, Of 
course not. That is a law of all good work, that 
a man cannot do it well with half his attention ; 
but why not, then, a law of work and life in the 
kingdom of God ? We have a great deal yet to 
learn about the words of Christ ; and one of the ' 
most important things is, that these apparently 
commonplace truths and familiar laws which he so 



180 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

often cites are merely sides, or ends if you please, 
of truths and laws which hold in the whole spirit- 
ual world. It is not, that, in this little picture of 
an incompetent farm-hand, Christ gives us some- 
thing like a law of the kingdom of God. He 
states the law itself. Good work requires the en- 
tire committal of the worker. It is the law of 
Christian service and of ploughing alike. It is 
this fact which lifts utterances like our text out of 
the region of commonplace. They seem common- 
place where they touch us, but their line runs out 
to truths which are not commonplace. The law 
of the plough followed up appears as the law of 
the kingdom of God. Now, this law of entire 
committal is familiar enough to us in its worldly 
applications. It is the great law of success in 
ordinary callings. When you choose a calling in 
life, it is said of you, " He is going to devote his 
life to business or to law or to medicine." And 
you know very well, that, if you are to succeed in 
either, the expression is none too strong. If you 
are going to be a successful doctor, you must give 
up being a successful merchant. You cannot ex- 
pect to be a power in science or in letters. You 
must commit and devote yourself wholly to the 
thing which you have chosen. And the kingdom 
of God is a more serious matter than law or medi- 
cine or business. Not one of these touches your 
real inner life. You may fail in business, and yet 
be the same man you were before you failed, — 
your real manhood as sound and true as when you 
handled hundreds of thousands. But the king- 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 181 

dom of God does touch your inmost self. The 
quality of your manhood turns on the nature of 
your relation to it. The issue is between the 
world and your life. You cannot fail in the king- 
dom of God and be the same man as if you had 
not failed. Failure there is radical. Moreover, 
if the variety and magnitude of business or pro- 
fessional interests demand your whole energy, 
much more surely the interests of the kingdom of 
God. It is harder to work out a Christ-like char- 
acter than to make a fortune. It is harder to 
overcome the world than to outride a panic or to 
withstand the fluctuations of the markets. It is 
harder to assert the character of the meek and 
lowly Jesus amid surrounding worldliness and 
against the upheavals of passion than to keep 
your credit unimpaired on 'change. The demands 
of the kingdom of God admit of no division 
of purpose, no half interest, no looking back. 
Ploughing is forward work, — all in advance. 
Each of us has a furrow to cut through that sec- 
tion of the kingdom of God which includes our 
lives. There is no call, there is no time, to look 
back. 

And, as a consequence, when you enter your 
plough in this spirit of entire committal, you agree 
to take whatever comes in the line of your plough- 
ing, and to plough through it or round it, and in 
no case to turn back because of it. As I have 
said before, the kingdom of God is full of sur- 
prises ; and you will come upon a good many un- 
expected things, and things as hard as they are 



182 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

unexpected. Your plough will often strike a 
rock under the greenest turf, and just where you 
thought the ploughing was going to be easiest. 
Your ploughing will not always lie on straight 
lines, either. There are curved as well as straight 
lines in God's plans, ends reached by indirection 
as well as directly. A farmer likes to cut straight 
furrows, and to make a handsome-looking field 
with the straight parallels ; but God is more con- 
cerned about our making a fruitful field than a 
handsome one, and will not always let us follow 
the straight lines of our plans. Any way, straight 
or crooked, you commit yourself to take what 
comes. It is no part of your business or mine in 
God's kingdom to make our conditions. When 
you give yourself to Christ, and enter your plough 
in his field, he arranges the conditions, and bids 
you work them out. If the conditions are to be 
changed, the right change will develop in faithful 
working out. I remember once, when travelling 
among the Spanish mountains in the midst of one 
of the loveliest scenes I ever beheld, my eye rested 
on a little tract on the side of a savage height. 
The patch was literally sown with rocks, and yet 
it had been most carefully ploughed. I suppose 
there was not a furrow in it that ran straight for 
five feet at a time ; but the ploughman had not 
looked back. He had ploughed on, round the 
rocks and between them. It was a good, thorough 
piece of work. So God selects the field for us, with 
its conditions, — rocks in one man's field, stumps 
in another's. The simple question is, Shall we 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 183 

plough that field ? God does not take away the 
stumps and rocks : what we do with them answers 
the question whether or not we are tit for the 
kingdom of God. Last week there came into my 
study a pastor of many years' standing, — a faith- 
ful, able, useful servant of God. I remember 
when I first heard him, over twenty-five years 
ago, when he stood before a great audience in the 
vigor of his early manhood, his hair black as a 
raven's wing. I remember how he woke the audi- 
ence from the lethargy of a summer noon, and 
swayed them with his wise and bright words ; and 
his speech that day stands out in my memory as 
one of the most telling and brilliant I ever heard. 
And he sat with me last week, the fire dimmed in 
his eye, his hair white as the driven snow, and 
went over a part of his history, — told of sickness 
and prostration, of burdens lifted in struggling 
churches, of divisions and dissensions among his 
people, of final success, and peaceful, happy minis- 
trations in a thriving church saved and established 
by his labor and sacrifice ; and he brought down 
his hand with emphasis as he said, "I have learned 
this one thing through it all, that God '« work is 
bound to go on anyway ; and that the only thing for 
us to do, is to stand in our place, and do our work, 
whatever comes." 

And, my brethren, you all know something about 
this in your own lives. You have all felt the jar 
when the plough struck a stone. Not one of you 
has been able to make straight furrows always. 
Not one of you who has tried to serve God faith- 



184 THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 

fully but has come to something in his ploughing 
which tempted him to look back; but the only 
thing for any of us to do, is to stand in our place, 
and do our work. There is no such thing as fail- 
ure of faithful work in God's kingdom ; and the 
simple reason of that is, because it is in God's 
kingdom and not man's ; and God's kingdom must 
come, and his will must and will be done in earth 
as it is in heaven : " He that goeth forth weeping 
and bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again 
with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him." 

The text presents to us a question of the pres- 
ent, a present responsibility. It is not a question 
whether you will be fit for heaven by and by, but 
whether, by absolute and entire committal to 
Christ, you are fit for the service of the kingdom 
here and now. Not one of us will venture to say 
positively that he is fit for the kingdom. God 
works out the problem of his kingdom on earth by 
the hands of imperfect men. But Christ puts to 
us this morning the great essential of unfitness — 
looking back ; a divided interest ; a half-way ser- 
vice ; an attempt to keep an eye on the world and 
an eye on the plough. Heaven will take care of 
itself, and of us if we only plough straight on. 
The line of the furrow, faithfully held, will lead 
out inevitably to where 

" Sweet fields beyond the swelling flood 
Stand dressed in living green," 

when the ploughing shall be done ; and the re- 
deemed shall walk with Christ by the living 



THE PLOUGH AND THE KINGDOM. 185 

fountains of waters. Have any of you unfitted 
yourselves for to-day's work in God's kingdom by 
taking back a part of what you gave to Christ, — 
by looking back? There was a time when, in 
the first freshness of your consecration to him, 
you were ready to say, " I will follow thee whith- 
ersoever thou goest." There was a time when 
faith was firm, and love burning, and labor for 
Christ a joy. Have the heats and languors of 
life's high noon paralyzed that first enthusiasm? 
Has the noise of the great world's striving and 
revelry, borne over the field to your ear, made you 
loose your hold on the plough, and turn longingly 
from your appointed work ? Have you grown cold 
toward Christ and his church, sceptical about the 
outcome of Christian work and the destinies of the 
kingdom of God, cautious and calculating, and dis- 
posed to spare self as much as may be ? If that be 
so, — which God forbid ! — the Saviour meets you 
this day with the warning, " No man, having put 
his hand to the plough, and looking back, is fit for 
the kingdom of God." 



XI. 
JOY AND JUDGMENT. 



XI. 

JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

" Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let thy heart cheer 
thee in the days of thy youth, and walk in the ways of thine 
heart, and in the sight of thine eyes : but know thou, that for all 
these things God will bring thee into judgment. Therefore re- 
move sorrow from thy heart, and put away evil from thy flesh : 
for childhood and youth are vanity. 

"Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while 
the evil days come not, nor the years draw nigh, when thou shalt 
say, I have no pleasure in them." — Eccles. xi. 9, 10; xii. 1. 

PERHAPS you think those opening words are 
said sarcastically. " Oh, yes, young man ! en- 
joy your life ; be merry ; have your fling ; you will 
find out to your cost what it all amounts to when 
the time of judgment comes round." That is the 
way the words have often been interpreted, and 
yet nothing can be farther from the truth. Our 
translators have slipped in a "but" where there 
ought to be an "and," and have thus made the 
preacher set the joy of youth and the judgment 
of God over against each other : " Rejoice in thy 
youth, but know that God will bring you into judg- 
ment for your rejoicing." Whereas, in fact, the 
judgment is put as part of the rejoicing : " Rejoice 
in thy youth ; and know that, respecting all these, 
God will bring thee into judgment." 

189 



190 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

The preacher, in short, frankly commends to 
youth a joyful, cheerful life as its natural and 
proper heritage. He means just what he says. 
He does not invite youth to a feast, and then set 
up the skeleton of judgment at the table to make 
him feast with fear and trembling. There is no 
covert irony in the call to rejoice. The judgment 
is brought in, but in a way, as we shall see, which 
ministers to the rejoicing instead of clouding it: 
" Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ! childhood 
and youth are vanity; they pass quickly away; 
age with its infirmity will come ; pleasure will lose 
its zest ; enjoy the beauty, the grace, the pleasure, 
of the world while you may." 

Possibly, these may seem strange words from 
the man to whom we owe the phrase, " Vanity of 
vanities ; all is vanity ! " And, if so, the strange- 
ness may stimulate you to study that old book, 
from which, it may be, you are repelled by its hard 
and dry name. There is nothing dry about the 
book. No book in the Bible is racier. It throbs 
with life and feeling ; it is full of ripe wisdom ; it 
is one of the most consolatory and cheerful por- 
tions of Holy Writ. 

Let us look at the two parts of the text sepa- 
rately, — joy and judgment ; and then we shall see 
how they fit into each other, and are parts of one 
great truth. And let me say, in advance, that 
we need be under no apprehension of finding the 
stringency of duty relaxed, or a life of sensual 
pleasure encouraged, by these first, hearty, cheer- 
ful words of the wise preacher : — 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 191 

" Rejoice, O young man, in thy youth ; and let 
thy heart cheer thee in thy youthful days, and 
pursue the ways of thine heart, and the things 
which are seen by the eyes." We are not listen- 
ing to a Christian moralist : nevertheless, the sen- 
timent is Christian. "Childhood and youth are 
vanity ; " that is to say, they are transient, fleeting. 
" Therefore," say a certain class of religionists, 
"extinguish their natural instincts as summarily 
as possible. They are transient ; therefore, they 
are of no acconnt. They are ' vanity ' ; therefore, 
to enjoy them is dangerous, if it be not sinful." 
But the logic of our old preacher takes a different 
line. Childhood and youth, or youth and man- 
hood, are fleeting ; therefore, " Banish sorrow from 
thy mind, and put away sadness from thy body." 
He evidently does not think that the brevity and 
transitoriness of a thing is a reason for despising 
it. Neither do you and I, when we deal with ordi- 
nary matters. The rose which you pluck in the 
morning withers before the next morning, but 
you delight yourself with its color and perfume 
none the less while it lasts. A summer morning, 
with its dewy freshness, is a tiring of only an hour 
or two ; but you do not, for that reason, shut your- 
self up in your chamber, and refuse to breathe 
the morning scents, and to look upon the sparkle 
of the dewdrops. Youth and fresh manhood are 
things only of a few years ; but their brevity is, 
to the preacher, the reason why they should be 
enjoyed. Those have done infinite damage who 
have set on foot the notion that youth, from the 



192 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

moment it turns to religion, surrenders all pleas- 
ure, lightness of heart, and robust enjoyment ; and 
such teachers have been betrayed into this terri- 
ble and fatal mistake through their failure to see 
that God's training is not to stunt or to crush out 
human nature, but to develop and elevate it. Our 
Lord, Christ, you will remember, said some very 
severe things about those teachers who had made 
religion a burden instead of a joy and a rest to the 
people. He called them thieves and robbers, who 
had stolen away the blessedness from life, and had 
tried to make it as small and lean a thing as possi- 
ble ; whereas, " I," said he, " came that they may 
have life, and may have it abundantly." Some 
people reason as if Christ had come only to reveal 
another life, whereas he came also to teach men 
how to make the most and best of this life at every 
stage. When a man is rooted and grounded in 
the love of Christ, Paul tells us he grows up, not 
into a cherub or an archangel, but into a perfect 
man ; and the pattern of this manhood is Christ. 
What the forces of Nature may do with the rose 
after it has withered and dropped from the stem, 
into what new combinations, or into what new 
forms of life its juices and fibre may enter, is a 
distinct question. Meanwhile, to-day the forces of 
Nature are all concentrating themselves to make a 
perfect rose. What you and I may be after death 
is indeed an interesting and a vital question ; but 
it does not set aside that other question, — how to 
make the best and most of this life in all its stages. 
These successive stages of Hfe are not independent. 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 193 

Childhood perpetuates its quality in youth, and 
youth in manhood, and manhood again in age. 
You realize the divine ideal of manhood to the 
degree in which you are true to the divine ideal 
of youth : " Remember thy Creator in the days of 
thy youth" Youth is pointed back to his creation. 
What stamp did the Creator set upon it ? What 
provision did he make for youth ? What did he 
mean youth to be ? Obedient, reverent, pure, dili- 
gent, — all that certainly ; yet as certainly fresh, 
joyous, vigorous. Remember thy Creator, to be 
in youth what he meant thee to be then. God has 
an ideal for the blossom as well as for the fruit, 
and the best fruit comes through the best-devel- 
oped blossom. The work of Christ the Redeemer 
does not contradict the work of God the Creator. 
God made man in his own image. Christ comes 
to bring out that image in men ; and Christ set it 
on childhood and youth no less than on manhood ; 
and God put into humanity, perceptions of beauty, 
the sense of humor, the love of society, suscepti- 
bility to harmony and color ; and to develop God's 
image is not to crush out these faculties, but to 
learn to use them. God knows that these facul- 
ties are freshest and keenest in youth, — that joy 
is native to youth as blossoms to spring. And 
the type of youth is not, therefore, the old man, 
burdened with cares, tired of the world, and sad- 
dened by experience. A joyless youth is as unnat- 
ural as ice in August: "Rejoice, O young man, in 
thy youth." 

It may be said, " At any rate, this aspect of the 



194 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

truth does not need pressing in our day, and it 
were better to warn youth against the coming 
judgment." And it seems to be assumed, more- 
over, that there is an antagonism between these 
two ideas of joy and judgment ; that the one ex- 
cludes the other ; that the thought of judgment is 
enough of itself to quench all rejoicing in youth. 
But the peculiarity of our text is, that it rejects 
this antagonism, and makes this coming judgment 
a cause of rejoicing — a stimulant of the joy of 
youth as well as a warning : " Rejoice, and know 
that God will bring thee into judgment. Banish, 
therefore, sorrow from thy mind, and put away 
sadness from thy body." 

Whenever this book may have been written, we 
find in it numerous allusions to a state of society 
which give these words about a future judgment 
a peculiar meaning and force ; for the book depicts 
a society under a capricious despotism, with all its 
corruptions and miseries. The grandees revel in 
palaces, vineyards, and pleasure-grounds ; kings are 
childish, and princes given to revelry and drunken- 
ness ; fools are uplifted, and noble men degraded ; 
riches are not for the intelligent, or favor for the 
learned ; to become rich is to multiply extortions ; 
life stands at the caprice of power ; sensuality runs 
riot. " In short, the whole political fabric was 
falling into disrepair and decay, the rain leaking 
through the rotting roof; while the miserable peo- 
ple were ground down with ruinous exactions, in 
order that the rulers might revel on undisturbed." 
And as the book reveals this fearful social con- 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 195 

dition, so, likewise, it gives expression to the tem- 
per which grows up in men's minds after a long 
course of such oppressions, — a kind of fatalism and 
hopelessness which tempts one to yield passively 
to the current of affairs ; to believe that God has 
ceased to rule, and that order and right have van- 
ished from the world; to snatch at every pleas- 
ure ; to drown care in sensuality, rather than try to 
maintain an integrity which is sure to be rewarded 
with personal and social ruin. That kind of tem- 
per, if it once gained headway, would affect all 
classes and ages. In the nobler and better-seasoned 
characters, it would become a proud despair; in 
vulgar minds, a bestial greed, and an untrammeled 
selfishness ; in youth, a prompter to unbounded 
sensuality. 

You can see, therefore, what a powerful antidote 
to this temper would be furnished by the truth of 
a future judgment. Once lodge firmly the truth 
that men are moving on through all the hard 
and bitter and unjust conditions of their time to a 
supreme tribunal, and you have made it impossi- 
ble to believe that the world is lawless. A final 
judgment implies a law ; and a law implies a law- 
giver, and an authority to administer and vindicate 
the law. Thus the truth carries with it both com- 
fort and obligation. There is a divine order in the 
world ; we are not finally at the mercy of chance 
or of men's caprice : the order will vindicate itself 
in time, and with itself will vindicate those who 
hold by it. So long as there is a judgment, wrong 
is not eternal, and retribution is a fact. There- 



196 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

fore, it is better to do right, notwithstanding the 
"oppressor's wrong and the proud man's contu- 
mely." It is better to live the life of duty and of 
charity described in this chapter ; to cast the bread 
upon the waters, though it seem to be lost ; to 
share even the few good things of life with seven 
and with eight; to sow the seed morning and 
evening, though unknowing whether this or that 
shall prosper ; better for the youth to curb passion, 
and to hold by purity and truth, and to cultivate 
duty. There is an order, a divine order, in the 
world ; and an order carries the fact of judgment 
along with it. So, too, it is better not to give way 
to despair. One can afford to be cheerful, even 
amid oppressions and troubles like these, if the 
time is short, and a day coming in which wrong 
shall be righted, and worth acknowledged and fidel- 
ity rewarded. 

The judgment is a fact which confronts us as 
Christians, — a fact emphasized by the words of 
Christ and of the apostles, and still further empha- 
sized by the relation in which Christ puts himself 
to it as the judge of all men. And the attitude of 
even our Christian thought towards it is largely 
that of terror and apprehension. Turn over the 
hymns in our own collection under the head of 
" judgment," and this will be evident. The key to 
the popular Christian sentiment is the familiar old 
Latin hymn, — 

" That day of wrath, that dreadful day." 

Of course, the terrible element is there in large 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 197 

measure. The element of solemnity must, in any 
case, dominate our thought of the last day. It can- 
not be other than a serious matter to appear before 
our Creator, and to give an account of the deeds 
done in the body. And assuredly it will be a day 
of wrath to rebels against God and to rejecters of 
Christ. An infallible and final judgment, which 
shall pronounce a man's life-work worthless, and 
the man himself a moral failure, must be woe 
and terror unutterable. But, withal, the truth has 
another side. It is not mere fancy which sees in 
the Judgment Day a day of consolation as well as of 
wrath. That other side is recognized in Scripture. 
Turn, for instance, to the ninety-sixth and ninety- 
eighth Psalms, composed during the period of the 
captivity, probably the same period in which this 
preacher wrote. What a glorious outburst of 
praise is this, in which all nature is summoned to 
join ! " Let the heavens rejoice, and let the earth 
be glad; let the sea make a noise, and all that 
therein is : let the floods clap their hands, and let 
the hills be joyful together before Jehovah; for he 
cometh to judge the earth. With righteousness shall 
he judge the world, and the people with equity." 
Or turn over to the Epistle to the Hebrews, and 
hear the apostle comparing the terrors which 
waited on the giving of the law at Sinai with the 
delights and privileges which attend the new cove- 
nant: "Ye are not come unto a mount that might 
be touched, and that burned with fire, and unto 
blackness and tempest. But ye are come unto 
mount Zion, and unto the city of the living God, 



198 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable hosts 
of angels, to the general assembly and church of 
the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, to the 
spirits of just men made perfect, and to Jesus the 
mediator of a new covenant, and to the blood 
of sprinkling that speaketh better than that of 
Abel." What a group of joys ! what a catalogue of 
privileges ! and into the midst of these is thrown 
one more : " and to God, the judge of all" It is 
not a discordant note. It is meant to accord, and 
does accord, with those sweetest of all sounds, — 
Jesus the Mediator, and the blood of sprinkling. 
The Mediator is the Judge, and the blood of sprin- 
kling has taken the terror out of judgment. 

Why, then, should a man, young or old, have 
the work or the pleasure peculiar to his age and 
circumstances clouded by the anticipation of judg- 
ment? Why may not the young man lawfully 
rejoice in his youth, provided he remembers his 
Creator ? The mistake is in divorcing the Creator 
and Judge from the joy of life ; whereas, God is 
the true joy of life. " In thy presence," says the 
Psalmist, "is fulness of joy; at thy right hand 
are eternal pleasures." That does not mean heaven 
only. If David, as seems probable, was thinking 
of the future state when he wrote these words, he 
was equally thinking of the present life ; for he 
says, " Thou wilt show me the path of life : in thy 
presence is fulness of joy." And if God is in the 
life of to-day as Creator and Counsellor and Admin- 
istrator, he is, by virtue of this, in the life of to-day 
as Judge. If you and I are moral beings, living 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 199 

under a moral order, the element of judgment is in 
to-day's life as really as it will be on the last day. 
Every day's life is a test. Every day's life brings 
us to the bar of that moral economy where con- 
science sits as God's assessor and deputy. Every 
day's life is rounded with the approving or con- 
demning verdict of conscience. God is not con- 
cealing and hoarding up his judgments, only to let 
them break forth as terrible surprises at the last 
day. Conscience anticipates daily the final ver- 
dict. The moment we are introduced to the great 
ideas of right and wrong, that moment we are 
introduced to the idea of judgment. And, if the 
fact that God is our Judge is in itself fatal to all 
joy and good cheer, that fact is fatal to all possible 
joy in God ; for God as Judge goes with God as 
Creator and Father and Friend. He is Judge by 
virtue of his being all these. Why then, I repeat, 
should the young man not rejoice in his youth, or 
a man of any age in the conditions peculiar to 
that age, provided they remember their Creator ? 
Whence come the pure pleasures of youth, — its 
hopefulness, its energy, its mirth, its sense of 
beauty? Do they not come from God? Is he 
not the Creator of these as well as of bone and 
muscle? And if these gifts are recognized as 
God's, are they not at once sweetened, and guarded 
against abuse by that very fact ? Christ tells us 
that one office of the Holy Spirit is to " convince 
of judgment ; " that is, to show men clearly that 
all sin deserves and will receive the judgment of 
God. Is it not, then, a cause of rejoicing, that God 



200 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

guards our pleasures against abuse, that he teaches 
us what true pleasure is, that he sets up a sign 
marked "judgment" at the border-line of excess? 
Is it not a real cause of rejoicing that God restrains 
us from incurring the judgment of sin ? Can that 
be real pleasure which ends in rebuke and punish- 
ment? And, therefore, when we recognize our 
legitimate pleasures as God's gift, our joy in them 
is heightened. We may enjoy without fear. God 
will not condemn what himself has ordained and 
created ; and when we look forward to the great 
judgment, the eternal life beyond, these very 
pleasures take on a prophetic character. They 
are foretastes, earnests of something better beyond. 
The pleasure at his right hand here, promises ful- 
ness of joy at his right hand forevermore. When 
we have learned that God is love, and is with us 
lovingly in this world, — with us, I say, down here 
amid these earthly conditions, helping us in every 
possible way to enjoy what is true, and to do what 
is right and best, and not far above us, regarding 
us as a critic, and seeking only to find fault with 
us, — when we have learned this, I say, are we to 
conclude, that, in the final judgment to which we 
are moving on, God is going to throw off this char- 
acter, and appear simply as an inexorable critic ? 

" Prepare to meet thy God ! " We hear it said 
in awful tones, as one would say to a convicted 
murderer, " Prepare for the scaffold ! " As if meet- 
ing God, the God we name " love " and " father," 
were the most dreadful of human experiences. 
But we do not talk in that way about any human 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 201 

object of love. When that wife or child or hus- 
band or brother of yours has been long gone across 
the sea, and the despatch is put into your hand 
that the ship is down at quarantine, there is no 
terror nor sorrow in your preparing to meet them. 
How your feet speed to the wharf ! How your 
eyes are strained to detect among the crowding 
masts the first cloud of smoke from the steamer's 
funnel ! How you can scarce restrain your impa- 
tience until the ship is made fast, and the plank let 
down, that you may spring on board, and greet the 
object of your love ! And you are the one who 

sings, — 

" My Saviour whom absent I love, 
Whom not having seen I adore." 



And 



" On earth we want the sight 
Of our Redeemer's face." 



And you are afraid to meet Him ! 

You see, then, how this wise old preacher, lifting 
up his voice in the very midst of a horrible and 
apparently hopeless social condition, found, in the 
fact of a coming judgment and of a future life, a 
basis for an exhortation to hopefulness and cheer- 
ful discharge of duty as well as a warning against 
sloth and sensuality. It is for us to find the same, 
and our doing so depends on one thing simply : 
remembering our Creator, early and late, in youth 
and throughout. There is nothing but terror in 
judgment if God be left out of to-day's life. There 
need be no terror in it if we take our Creator and 
our Judge into our life to-day and every day. Our 



202 JOY AND JUDGMENT. 

God, into whose hand we put ours with confiding 
faith, is not going to lead us to the judgment-seat, 
only to dash away our hand, and mount the throne, 
and thunder denunciation at us. If he has minis- 
tered comfort and pleasure to us along our earthly 
way, depend upon it these are only a foretaste of 
larger comfort and perfect rest by and by. To him 
who remembers his Creator, the judgment will be 
fruition and not blight. You profess, my brother, 
to live your life by faith. Of your own choice you 
cast in your lot with the unseen Christ, and staked 
every thing on his promise, against the remon- 
strances of the worldly wise, it may be, against 
temptations of worldly policy. The great feature 
of that day will be the revelation of that unseen 
Christ, and the consequent vindication of your 
faith. You have made your decisions in this life 
according to his tests, — tests which the world has 
pronounced fanciful and fallacious. You have 
brought your dealings to the standard of his char- 
acter and example, and have judged them right or 
wrong according to these. Then He himself shall 
appear on the throne of judgment. All these cen- 
turies he has been trying to make the world recog- 
nize him as Judge : now they shall be compelled to 
recognize him, and to confess that his judgments 
are just. You have put your trust for salvation in 
the blood of the everlasting covenant. You have 
pinned your faith to a crucified Saviour in the face 
of philosophy's reasonings against the reality and 
virtue of the Atonement. Jesus, the Mediator of a 
new covenant, will then appear as God, the Judge 



JOY AND JUDGMENT. 203 

of all : your faith will be vindicated ; and the cross, 
that stumbling-block to the Jew, that folly to the 
Greek, that symbol to the world of degradation 
and ignominy, shall stand out brighter than all 
Heaven's morning stars, as the sign of eternal vic- 
tory and glory. You have worked faithfully, and 
have gotten no earthly reward for it. The Judg- 
ment will give you your reward. You have been 
misunderstood, wrongfully accused : the Judgment 
shall set you right. Your heart has been hot over 
wrongs and cruelties, cheats and shams, which you 
could not help. You shall see them meet their 
due there. You shall see them stand in their 
naked vileness, blasted with the eternal curse of 
the Judge of all. You have had sorrow and pain 
and disappointment here : little of the world's pity 
has come to you. You have been tempted to think 
the award of Providence a harsh one. God shall 
show you then why it all was, and 

" Heaven's eternal bliss shall pay 
For all his children suffer here." 



XII. 

SILENT BEFORE GOD. 



XII. 

SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

"I was dumb, I opened not my mouth ; because thou didst 
it." — Ps. xxxix. 9, 

THIS psalm is the utterance of a man in trou- 
ble. It thrills with a strong but repressed 
feeling. The writer is striving for resignation, but 
not wholly resigned ; afraid of dishonoring God by 
a hasty word, yet longing for light from heaven. 
His heart is hot within him : as he muses over 
the brevity of life and the vanity of man, as he 
thinks how all his fathers were strangers and pil- 
grims as he is, — with the same troubles, the same 
problems, the same sense of desolation, — the fire 
burns ; his soul is in a ferment. 

In a thoughtful man, trouble always doubles it- 
self. Added to the smart of the immediate afflic- 
tion is the moral problem which it raises, — the 
great question, raised anew by each successive 
generation of thinkers and believers, of the reason 
and the justice of God's administration in the 
world, of the permission of evil, of the tendency 
and destiny of this vain show called life. Every 
special sorrow or disaster is a stream, setting to- 

207 



208 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

wards this unfathomable ocean of thought with a 
swift and resistless current. 

The psalm, I need hardly say, represents a famil- 
iar experience. If the world, is not made up of 
great thinkers, it is full of people who feel deeply ; 
and deep feeling is thought in solution, — none the 
less so because they are few who can precipitate 
the thought, and crystallize it. 

The psalm, as I have said, indicates strong re- 
pression as well as strong feeling. The writer is 
on his guard against hasty speech : " I said, I will 
take heed to my ways, that I sin not with my 
tongue : I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while 
the wicked is before me. I held my peace even 
from good." This was the dictate of a goodly 
prudence. Conscious of the excited state of his 
heart, he was afraid lest he should say something 
out of its abundance which might dishonor God in 
the eyes of wicked men who were watching him. 
But in our text we get down, I think, to a deeper 
reason for silence. The man seems to be so over- 
come by the grandeur and the mystery of God's 
dealing with him that he is forced to be silent. 
Ordinary sorrow tends to vent itself in speech. 
Some mysteries, which present a point of light 
here and there, we discuss ; we find a kind of sat- 
isfaction in comparing views, and suggesting pos- 
sible solutions : but now and then we are brought 
face to face with a tremendous experience, where 
we instinctively concede that there is nothing to 
be said. God has done it : that is all. The thing 
gives no clew to itself: we stand like a belated 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 209 

traveller before the closed gate of an Egyptian 
temple, rising, low-browed and grim, under the 
stars, and no sound answers our knock. We must 
sit down and wait. 

This, then, is the simple, stern picture of our 
text, — a man in silence before the truth, God did 
it! 

It does not seem at first as if much can be 
worked out from those two factors, yet let us not 
be too hasty ; and let us say at once that this text, 
and whatever we may be able to draw from it, are 
not for an atheist. The text assumes God to be a 
fact, and further assumes faith in God. We are 
not going to these words for proof of God's being 
or of God's providence, but, taking both these for 
granted, to see if we can get out of these two 
naked facts any light upon the relation between 
the providence and its subject, between God and 
the man who is dumb before his stroke, and be- 
wildered by his mystery. 

" Thou didst it ! " In the first place, then, it is 
something to have gotten firm hold of a fact. A 
grea,t deal is gained when the sorrow, however 
severe, or the mystery, however dark, has been 
traced up to God. When we can say, not some- 
thing, but someone, did it, the matter is greatly 
simplified. We have no longer to count chances. 
Whatever we may think of the justice or the rea- 
son or the quality of the dispensation, we know 
its source. Our questioning has no longer to 
range about the realms of chance, or the possible 
combinations of natural forces : it is confined to 



210 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

God. The origin of the thing is fixed. God did 
it. We know at least whom to question, if we do 
not get an answer. Though the light for which 
we are looking may be hidden by clouds, we at 
least know whither to direct our telescope. If 
there is any solution to be given, we are on the 
right road and in the right attitude when our face 
is turned towards God. 

The fact, indeed, reduces us to silence ; but let 
us be sure that we understand the meaning of the 
hand that is laid for the time over our mouth. 
It need not mean that God is rebuking our in- 
quiry, or forbidding us to pursue it. It cannot 
mean that God is tantalizing us. It need not 
even mean that he intends to deny us a solution. 
It may mean that he is putting us in the way of a 
solution. A teacher sets for a boy a hard problem 
in algebra. The boy goes resolutely to work. 
The day passes, and he cannot solve it, He 
takes it home with him, and works at it there. 
He comes back next day, and all day he is busy 
with his problem ; and towards the close of the 
school-day, with his face flushed, and with perhaps 
an angry tremor in his voice, he comes to the 
teacher, and says, " I cannot do it : " and then he 
begins to talk passionately, to tell what methods 
he has tried, to hint that the teacher may have 
made a mistake in his statement, to complain that 
this or that in his algebra is not clearly defined. 
The teacher sees the difficulty; and, as the first 
step toward clearing it up, he quietly says, "Be 
still ! Do not talk any more ! I set the problem, 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 211 

and I know it is right." And if he says no more 
for the time, and the boy goes back to his seat, he 
has gained something in that interview. There is 
power in the thought which the lad turns over in his 
mind, — " This problem was set by somebody that 
knows. My teacher, whom I have always found 
wise and truthful, did it." The thought that there 
may have been a mistake in the statement of the 
sum goes out of his mind, and the matter is thus 
far relieved, at any rate : and, under the impulse 
of that relief, he may attack the question again, 
and successfully ; or, if not, he will gain by silence, 
by restraint. Let the teacher speak, and let him 
simply listen. The teacher wisely silences him, 
not to check his inquiry, but to bring his mind 
into the right condition to receive explanation. 

Just so, we are often, in the presence of our 
sorrows or of our hard questions, like this Psalm- 
ist, — our heart hot within us, our mind a ferment 
of wild questionings. The best thing for God to 
do with us then is to silence us, and to set us 
pondering the naked truth, — God did it ! ponder- 
ing it without argument, without debate, without 
remonstrance. If he were to give explanations 
in our heated and confused state, we could not 
appreciate them. We may think, perhaps, his 
reducing us to silence is an arbitrary refusal to 
enlighten us ; but we may possibly discover, after 
we have been silent a while, that a better and 
ampler explanation lies in the words, " Thou didst 
it." 

The most remarkable illustration of this is found 



212 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

in the Book of Job. To appreciate it fully, we 
need to study the entire book, and to follow its 
wonderful development to its conclusion. Job 
was confronted at once with the most terrible 
affliction, and with the profoundest and most per- 
plexing of moral problems. The two were inter- 
twined: the problem grew out of the affliction, 
and the affliction aggravated the problem. He 
had been a just and God-fearing man. He had 
been a prosperous man, and he never had thought 
of questioning that his prosperity was the reward 
of his piety. That was the doctrine of the cur- 
rent theology, and he accepted it. Now his pros- 
perity was swept away, his household desolated, 
his person horribly tormented and disfigured: and 
the logical outcome of his theology could only be, 
that he was being smitten for sin, as he had been 
rewarded for goodness ; and this his friends urged 
with all the weight of their wisdom, and with, 
much bitterness and unfairness. But Job would 
not admit the conclusion of his own logic. Like 
many another man who has all his life passively 
accepted formulas, he found that his formulas 
would not stretch to cover his case. He was con- 
scious of his integrity, and he would not refuse 
the testimony of that consciousness. He would 
not admit that he was being punished for sin. 
But then came in the other and greater difficulty : 
"If not for sin, then why? If I have walked 
justly before God, why does he smite me thus? 
Is he a just God, who renders to men according to 
their works ? If I have sinned, why does he not 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 213 

show me my sin ? Why does he not at least ex- 
plain his dealing with me, and vindicate his own 
justice and love ? " This is the agony which 
throbs and seethes through this wonderful poem, 
— Job trying to understand God, groping in the 
darkness of his misery for that presence which he 
dimly feels is behind it all, but which he cannot 
grasp, and from which he can draw not a word. 
" Oh ! " he says, " if God would but speak, or let 
me speak to him ! He is not a man as I am, whom 
I might answer, that we should come together in 
judgment. There is no arbiter between us, to lay 
his hand on us both, who would remove his rod 
from me, so that the dread of him should not 
overawe me. If there were, I would speak, and 
not fear him. I would address myself to the 
Almighty. I crave to reason with God. Oh that 
my words were written down ! that they were 
inscribed in a book, with an iron pen and lead, 
cut deep in the rock forever ! Oh that I knew 
where I might find him ! I would press even to 
his seat. I would set out my cause before him, 
and fill my mouth with pleas." 

And at last, after he has poured out his soul in 
bitterness, after he has sinfully impeached God's 
justice, has fiercely shaken his innocence in the 
Almighty's face, and has driven his ill-judging 
friends from the field with his indignant eloquence, 
the heavens darken. Even while Elihu is speaking, 
he sees the spreading of the clouds, and hears the 
crash of the Almighty's pavilion. God clothes 
his palms with lightning, and flings his flash across 



214 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

the heavens ; and out of the midst of thunder and 
wind and great rain comes at last the voice which 
Job has been hungering to hear. The agony of 
the great debate has reached its climax ; and, as 
eagerly as Job, we wait to hear the words which 
shall answer for us, as for him, the question why 
Almighty love sends suffering upon the good, and 
mystery to the honest inquirer. And what do we 
get? Magnificent poetry, indeed, in those four 
chapters, 1 — splendid descriptions of God's wisdom 
in nature, of his power in the sea, and his beauty 
in the dawn, but not a word of explanation ; no 
answer to the question which has been torturing 
Job's heart, no unfolding of the how or why. So 
far as that is concerned, God remains silent, and 
Job must still be dumb. The only answer is, " I 
did it. You must take me as the solution of the 
mystery." "But that is no solution," cries one 
impatiently. I am not so sure of that. Job found 
it a solution. Job was a thinker, — a deeper thinker 
than either of his friends. It was because he 
thought so deeply, because he appreciated the 
magnitude of these awful questions of Providence 
and destiny, that his agony was so terrible. If he 
could have plastered over these mysteries with cer- 
tain well-worn sayings as deftly as Bildad and 
Eliphaz and Zophar did, or as some comfortable 
people do at this day, he could have borne his 
bodily ailments better. But Job, out there on the 
refuse-heap, found out what some of us find out in 

1 Job xxxviii.-xli. 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 215 

our familiar lines of institutionalism, that there are 
some questions larger than the catechism, — some 
questions which, when we try to cover them with 
convenient formulas and familiar oracles, have an 
awkward way of exposing bare corners : and yet 
Job, thinker as he was, as anxious to know how 
and why as any modern rationalist, did find a solu- 
tion in God's answer. He found God, and that 
satisfied him. When the whirlwind and the voice 
are past, Job is another man : he is no longer the 
protester. He is bowed humbly, penitently, ador- 
ingly, contentedly, before his Maker. 

Perhaps there is almost as great a mystery to us 
in Job's satisfaction as in the process of his trial ; 
and one reason why it is a mystery is, that we 
cleave so obstinately to the position that satisfac- 
tion and peace can come only through our knowing 
why things are. There is a nearer point of rest ; 
but we overlook it, and keep our eyes on the far- 
off cloud behind which, as we think, lies explana- 
tion and consequent satisfaction : and God denies 
this fundamental position of ours. Firmly and 
steadily he presses our attention towards the 
nearer point, which at first seems less promising, — 
that satisfaction lies in knowing God rather than 
in knowing the reasons for God's dealings. The 
compass-needle swings persistently round from the 
reason why to "I did it," — from the philosophy 
to the fact of Providence. Job's comfort came out 
of the fact that he had found God. His friends 
had been prating to him about God's character and 
God's laws and God's methods ; and it had all gone 



216 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

no deeper than his ear. " I had heard of thee," 
he says, " with the hearing of the ear, but now 
mine eye seeth thee." Oh, what a difference 
there is between knowing about God and knowing 
God ! The reason why the philosophic spirit is so 
restless, so querulous, so hard to satisfy, is not in 
the extent of its knowledge, but in the shortness of 
it. It ranges about God, contemplates God, studies 
God from without ; but it does not penetrate to the 
Father in heaven. God satisfied Job by revealing 
himself. The sorely tortured man did not find ex- 
planation, but he found something better. There 
was a wealth of comfort and hope in the fact that 
God spoke to him. This he had been craving: 
now God speaks. He is not indifferent to him ; 
he is not alienated from him ; he has not been 
indifferently looking down upon the sufferer from 
the far-off region of his divine splendor and per- 
fect bliss. He has done this thing ; the suffering 
is of his sending ; he is in the heart of the mys- 
tery : and so it was with Job as with a frightened 
child in the dark, conjuring up troops of phantoms, 
shaken with nameless terrors, — when the mother's 
voice calls out of the dark, " I am here," the 
child sinks into quiet, not seeing the mother, not 
knowing how her presence acts to dissipate the 
terrors of the night, — knowing simply the precious, 
all-sufficient fact, that mother is there in the dark. 
" Well," it may be said, " all that may do very 
well for a child ; but a reasoning man cannot be 
disposed of in that way." All I can say is, many 
a reasoning man has to accept that or nothing. 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 217 

After all, it may be that the child's satisfaction has 
something rational at bottom ; according to divine 
reason at least, since the gospel tells us that this 
great mystery of the kingdom of God, with its 
hard questions, and its Cross and discipline and 
tribulation, must be received as a little child if 
received at all. Reason cannot compel God to 
answer ; and, suppose it could, would man be the 
better ? Would he understand any more if God 
should tell him all he wants to know ? Can there 
not be a better gift than knowledge ? Surely it is 
not unreasonable to ask ; since it is clear enough, 
that the men who know most are not always, nor 
perhaps often, the happiest of men. Take a simple 
illustration. There are certain reasons connected 
with your child's education or inheritance which 
constrain you to live for some years in an uncon- 
genial and unpleasant place. Neither climate, 
scenery, nor society is what you could desire. The 
child asks, " We are not poor, are we, father ? " 

— " No." — " Could we not live somewhere else ? " 

— " Yes." — " Then, why do we stay here when 
there are so many pleasant places elsewhere ? " 
You cannot tell him ; he could not understand the 
reasons ; but, for all that, the lesson that child 
learns through your silence, through being obliged 
to be content with the simple fact, father does it, 
is more valuable than the knowledge of the rea- 
sons. It is the lesson of confidence, of trust in 
your love and in your wisdom, of unquestioning 
obedience. Even if he should make a shrewd and 
precocious guess at your reasons, that would not 



218 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

please you half so much as his cheerful, unques- 
tioning acceptance of the truth that you love hirn, 
and will do what is best for him. That moral re- 
lation between you is worth infinitely more than 
any amount of intellectual sympathy. And the 
very foundation of true character and success lies 
in dependence on God. God cannot develop the 
best possibilities of any soul until that soul is first 
sure of him, — sure that what he does is right, 
simply because he does it ; and that is why God 
lays so much stress on that lesson. That is why 
he so often brings his child face to face with the 
bare " I did it," until he learns to find in it his 
refuge and his comfort. That kind of teaching 
may not make philosophers, — when it does, it 
makes them of a large mould, — but it makes 
Pauls and Luthers. 

But this " thou didst it " has some treasures of 
knowledge for us. Faith is not ignorance. Some 
of you remember a story, by a once-popular Irish 
poet, of a Greek youth who travelled to Egypt in 
search of the secret of immortality. One night, 
by the bank of the Nile, he found a little pyramid, 
seemingly as solid as the rock itself, but, as he 
examined it more closely, he found hints of a con- 
cealed opening, and finally struck a spring, and a 
door opened, which led him into a region of won- 
ders. And even so, as we go round and round 
this " thou didst it," which seems so bare and so 
hard and so unpromising, which suggests at first 
only relentless will and resistless power, it begins 
to open : it conceals something, and we begin to 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 219 

make discoveries. God did it. Well, then, I know 
that infinite wisdom did it : these hard problems 
of Providence, these mysteries of society and of 
man, — I am not to conclude that they are untrans- 
latable. There is a wisdom which understands the 
maze, and holds the clew to it. This tangle of 
society has a thread which passes up into God's 
hand. If he chooses not to unravel it now, there 
is a wise reason for it. If the tangle is here, it 
does not follow that it does not clear itself higher 
up. Perhaps this mystery has a power of training 
for me. "If," says a recent writer, "proof were 
possible ; if God could inspire, or man indite, an 
argument which should once for all interpret our 
life to us, solve all its problems, dispel all its mys- 
tery, — it is still open to doubt whether it would 
be well that we should have it ; for the mystery 
which encompasses us on every side is an educa- 
tional force of the highest value. With certainty, 
we might be content, and we might rust in our 
content ; but with mystery within us, and on 
every side of us, compelling us to ask, What does 
this mean, and that; and, above all, what does God 
mean by it all? we lose the rest of content, to 
gain a strife of thought which impels us onward 
and upward, and for which, in the end, we shall all 
be wiser and happier." 

God did it. Then, I know that infinite power 
did it. "Ah!" you say, "we know that but too 
well. The stroke is on our hearts and homes. It 
is written on fresh graves, and in the scar of dreary 
partings." All true. But has power no other 



220 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

aspect than this terrible one? Shall we symbolize 
it only by a hand hurling thunderbolts? or may 
we not picture a hand, strong indeed, but open, 
and pouring forth blessings ? " All power is given 
unto me," says Jesus. Yet he laid his hand on 
blind eyes, and they saw; on the paralytic, and 
he leaped and ran. The prophet saw these two 
meanings in infinite power : " Let us return unto 
the Lord ; for he hath torn, and he will heal us : 
he hath smitten, and he will bind up and revive 
us." Infinite power to destroy must imply infinite 
power to heal. Power to let loose the flood must 
be also power to say, " Thus far shalt thou go, and 
no farther; and here shall thy proud waves be 
stayed." And the power which turneth man to 
destruction, and sayeth, " Return to dust, ye chil- 
dren of men," is our dwelling-place in all genera- 
tions, yea, to everlasting, — the power which can 
stir the dead dust, and say to it, " Return to life ! " 
which can make us glad, according to the days 
wherein he has afflicted us, and the years wherein 
we have seen evil. 

God did it, and therefore I know that infinite 
love did it. That is a piece of knowledge worth 
having indeed. Surely, when we reach that, we 
find the rock yielding water. Ah ! we have to 
creep back for rest into the shadow of love, after 
all. There is a solution of mystery and sorrow 
which is not by logic. Just what it is, just how it 
is, you and I can no more tell than we could tell 
how a child is comforted, even before it has told 
its sorrow, by the mere pressure of its mother's 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 221 

arms. Moses knew when lie said, " The eternal 
God is thy refuge, and underneath are the ever- 
lasting arms." Logic ! How grimly these mighty 
mysteries smile at logic ! Men start with the facts 
and conditions of their earthly existence, with the 
things which they see and know, and draw their 
straight, logical lines, and think they keep on, in 
undeviating course, straight up to the region of 
the divine counsels ; and they seem to forget, that, 
just as a starbeam is turned from its direct line 
by passing into another atmosphere, so the line 
of their human logic may be strangely refracted 
when it passes out of the denser atmosphere of 
man's thought into the high, clear region of the 
divine thought. No : the way to God is not the 
logician's way. No man ever reasoned himself to 
God ; no man ever reasoned himself into submis- 
sion under God's strokes, or into restfulness amid 
his mysteries. The child's way is the only way, — 
going direct to him who did it, and resting in 
silence, if need be, on his divine heart. 

And how this truth gathers power when we go 
to this text, taking Christ with us ! How it kin- 
dles under his touch ! God did it ; and I look up 
into that face of unspeakable love, with its thorn- 
marked brow, and say, " Thou didst it. He that 
hath seen thee hath seen the Father. I am in 
sorrow; the sorrow is driven home by a pierced 
hand : thou didst it. I am in darkness : the key 
to the mystery is in the same hand. The hand is 
closed; it will not surrender the key: but thou 
didst it; and, if I may only hold that hand, no 



222 SILENT BEFORE GOD. 

matter for the key. The pierced hand tells me of 
the loving heart behind the hand; and, if love 
hath done it, let me be silent and content. 

My brethren, there is not one of us who is not 
confronted with hard questions in his thought, 
and with painful mysteries of Providence in his 
life. These things have a meaning, believe it. 
Ultimately that meaning may be knowledge , 
but, before knowledge, their meaning is character. 
Here on earth their first meaning is not knowl- 
edge. That is evident enough from the way in 
which they baffle our inquiries, and refuse to 
give up their interpretation to our intellects ; but 
the moment we approach them from the side of 
love and trust and obedience, they open their 
lips. God's Tightness is our first object of search ; 
and not with the intellect, but with the heart, 
man believeth unto righteousness. God's adminis- 
tration stimulates inquiry. God's dispensations, 
which break our hearts, will set us questioning. 
We must question. We shall never cease ques- 
tioning. God never meant that we should. But 
you know how, when astronomers erect an observ- 
atory, the first thing is to lay a foundation for the 
great telescope. Deep down in the earth they 
ground the massive piers ; so deep that no jar of 
passing wheels shall cause the delicately poised 
instrument to vary a hair's breadth. Let us sweep 
the horizon of divine truth : let us bring to bear 
the most powerful lenses which learning and phi- 
losophy can prepare ; but, first of all, let us have 
a solid foundation for our telescope. Our intel- 



SILENT BEFORE GOD. 223 

lects will work more calmly, more discriminatingly, 
to far better purpose, when our hearts are at rest 
in God. 

Over the arched gate of the Alhambra at Gra- 
nada, there is sculptured an open hand ; and over 
the arch just beyond, a key. It is said that the 
haughty and luxurious Moors, who held that pal- 
ace-fort for so many years, were wont to boast that 
the gate never would be opened to the Christians 
until the hand should take the key. Many a Prov- 
idence, like this fortress, contains within its rough 
walls and frowning battlements fountains of living 
water ; but none the less the gate is shut, and the 
grim bastions give no hint of shelter or rest. How 
many of you have been forced to stand silent before 
one of God's heart-breaking mysteries, and to con- 
tent yourselves for the time with the simple " Thou 
didst it " ! But, O my friend ! stand still a little 
longer, not in wrath, nor in despair. By and by 
the hand will take the key, — the hand " which 
openeth, and no man shutteth." The gate shall 
open into the heart of the Providence ; and, behind 
the stern "thou didst it," shall stand revealed 
eternal love and eternal peace. 



XIII. 

A LEPEE'S LOGIC. 



XIII. 

A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

" And it came to pass, while he was in one of the cities, behold, 
a man full of leprosy : and when he saw Jesus, he fell on his face, 
and besought him, saying, Lord, if thou wilt, thou canst make 
me clean. And he stretched forth his hand, and touched him, 
saying, I will ; he thou made clean. And straightway the leprosy 
departed from him." — Luke v. 12, 13. 

THIS man apparently had no doubt of our 
Lord's ability to heal him: " Thou canst make 
me clean." It was about Christ's willingness to 
heal him that he was in doubt : " If thou ivilt, thou 
canst." His coming to Jesus was an act of faith, 
but of incomplete faith, — a faith which, having 
grasped the truth of divine saving power, failed 
to grasp the collateral truth of divine saving love. 
As in so many other cases, we have to deal here, 
not only with a single incident, but with a repre- 
sentative case and a general principle. The prin- 
ciple is, that true faith grasps alike the power and 
the good-will of God. The truth is laid down in 
the words of the writer to the Hebrews, on the 
nature of faith: "He that cometh to God must 
believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of 
them that seek after him." The leper's imperfect 

227 



228 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

faith represents that of thousands at the present 
day, who, without any doubt of God's ability to 
help them, are not convinced of his disposition 
to help them. 

Setting aside for the present the special causes 
of this doubt in the leper's case, we see, that, as 
a rule, men do not naturally associate love and 
power, and that they believe in the existence of 
power far more readily than in that of love. They 
know little about the nature or the secret of 
power, yet there are multitudes who admire and 
trust it all the more for the very mystery which 
envelops it. The annals of popular delusions are 
full of illustrations of this. And such people 
exaggerate power. Your little child, for instance, 
places no limit to your power. He will ask you 
to do an impossible thing just as readily as he 
will ask you for a sugar-plum or a picture-book. 
It does not enter his mind that there is any thing 
his father cannot do. It is the same with the 
masses of men. They are little more than chil- 
dren in the hands of their leaders. They ascribe 
to them more power than they have. This leper 
was an illustration of the same fact : he knew lit- 
tle or nothing of the divine nature of Jesus ; he 
did not know that all power was given to him in 
heaven and on earth ; he had probably heard of 
some wonderful things that Jesus had done, and 
hence he leaped to the conclusion, rightly as it 
happened, but none the less irrationally, that Jesus 
could take away this most terrible of all afflictions 
if he would. 



mam 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 229 

On the other hand, there is no such tendency to 
exaggerate love. That child, — to go back to the 
illustration, — familiar with love, brought up in its 
very atmosphere, compassed about with its tender 
ministrations, — that child, who believes in his 
father's power to perform the impossible, is scepti- 
cal about his father's disposition to pardon his fault, 
and will hide himself when he hears his father's 
step, and knows that his breaking of the vase or 
his upsetting of the inkstand will be found out. 

Power, somehow, seems to create distrust hi 
love. Perhaps it is because the world is so used* 
to seeing power used arbitrarily and selfishly that 
power seems practically to exclude love. The 
natural instinct of mankind associates power with 
its deities. That is, perhaps, the fundamental idea 
in the natural conception of Deity. The African 
who bows down before his horrible fetich is 
moved to that act by the belief that it has a 
strange and terrible power over his life, and his 
success in war or in hunting; but the familiar 
Pagan mythologies show us that the gods were 
expected to use their power in the interest of their 
passions and caprices, and not, habitually at least, 
for the good of their worshippers. It was to be 
expected that a Jove would hurl blighting thun- 
derbolts, or assume human or other form to work 
mischief and sorrow in the homes of men ; that a 
Mercury should outwit men with his divine cun- 
ning : it was not to be expected that all this super- 
human power and wit should be concentrated upon 
human welfare. 



230 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

Now, it is this very error which the God of the 
Bible, through all his administration, has been at 
work to overcome, and to put in its place, and to 
get lodged firmly in men's hearts, the conviction 
that God loves them, and "is more willing to give 
good things to them that ask him than earthly 
parents are to give good gifts unto their children ; " 
that God, in other words, literally puts himself at 
the service of those who love him. But this lesson 
has to make its way slowly against the natural 
incredulity of which we have spoken. If the ques- 
tion were merely of divine power, there would be 
much more bold coming to the throne of the heav- 
enly grace to obtain mercy and help in time of 
need. To all of us, God and power have long since 
become convertible terms. We all say, instinctive- 
ly, when our needs, our sorrows, our sins oppress 
us, " Thou canst." But we are often held back 
from the throne of power by that little but mighty 
" if?" — " If thou wilt." Christ came to break the 
hold of that " if," and to fill the souls of those who 
seek him with the conviction, so well voiced in the 
old hymn we used to hear so often, — 

" This, this, is the God we adore, — 
Our faithful, unchangeable Friend, 
Whose love is as great as his power, 
And neither knows measure nor end." 

Another reason why men are so slow to associate 
love and willingness with power in their thought 
of God, lies in the consciousness of sin : and hence, 
strange as it may seem, this reluctance to believe 
in God's love develops along with right concep- 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 231 

tions of God as a God of holiness ; for the appre- 
ciation of God's infinite holiness by man reveals 
man's own imperfection, tends to make him out of 
heart with self, and to fill him with self-contempt. 
When Peter, as the story is told in the verses just 
preceding this incident, saw the divine power of 
Christ displayed in the miraculous filling of the 
net with fish, the first result was not to draw him 
to Christ, but, on the contrary, to make him say, 
" Depart from me ; for I am a sinful man, O Lord." 
And, in the light of this fact, the incident of 
our text has a peculiar force ; for the disease from 
which this man was suffering was not regarded as 
the most fearful of hodily ills only. As you study 
the Levitical code, you find that provisions respect- 
ing leprosy are more than mere sanitary regula- 
tions. They give to this horrible disease a moral 
and typical meaning, as a representative of sin. 
It was a decomposition of the vital juices, putre- 
faction in a living body ; and hence an image of 
death, introducing the same dissolution and de- 
struction of life into the bodily sphere which sin 
introduced into the spiritual. The leper was 
treated throughout as a sinner. " He was," as has 
been remarked, " a dreadful parable of death." 
He bore the emblems of death, — the rent gar- 
ments, the bare head, the covered lip ; and in his 
restoration the same instruments and symbols were 
used as for the cleansing of one defiled by a dead 
body, and which were never used on any other 
occasion, — cedar-wood, with its well-known anti- 
septic qualities, a symbol of the continuance of 



232 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

life ; scarlet, a symbol of freshness of life ; hyssop, 
a symbol of purification from the corruption of 
death. Hence you can understand why the Psalm- 
ist, in his prayer for pardon, says, "Purge me 
with hyssop, and I shall be clean." Moreover, 
this disease, like sin, was incurable by human 
skill, and entailed upon the sufferer the penalty 
of exclusion from the commonwealth of Israel, 
even as it is said of the holy city of John's vision, 
" There entereth nothing that defileth." 

The case of this leper, therefore, gave our Lord 
an opportunity not only to do a work of mercy 
and love upon a diseased man, but also to give a 
symbolic testimony of his willingness to deal lov- 
ingly and forgivingly with a sinful man. Quite 
possibly one thing which led the leper to doubt 
Christ's willingness to heal him, was the peculiarly 
horrible and fatal character of his disease. Christ, 
as he had probably heard, had healed other mala- 
dies, but he had not heard of his healing leprosy ; 
and was it possible that this thing, so terrible that 
it cut him off from the society of his people, and 
caused him to be held and treated as a dead man, 
— was it possible that Christ would be willing to 
deal with this as he had with other and milder 
forms of disease ? 

And, in showing that he was willing as well as 
able, Christ, I repeat, told the world, that as he 
was not repelled from the worst form of bodily 
evil, so he was not repelled from that of which 
this disease was the type. His word, " I will," his 
touch upon the leper, said to those who were 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 233 

watching him, and to all who should henceforth 
read the story, " Nothing stands in the way of my 
good-will towards those who seek me. No taint, 
bodily or spiritual, holds back my love or my 
power from one who needs and wants me. Him 
who wants me, I want. He who is willing will 
find me willing. Him that cometh to me, I will in 
no wise cast out. There is no if about my willing- 
ness any more than about my power." 

Here, then, we see Christ's willingness tested 
and vindicated by the very worst case which could 
appeal to it. If his willingness did not stop at 
leprosy, it would stop at no form of bodily evil ; 
and we need this lesson every whit as much as 
the men of that time did. The only Christ for 
us is the Christ who is willing to deal lovingly 
with our worst. And here the doubt comes in. 
To repeat what I have already said, as men ac- 
quire true conceptions of God, they get appalling 
and disheartening views of themselves. Like the 
Psalmist, they remember God, and are troubled ; 
and this is all as it should be : only the true mean- 
ing of this terrible revelation of self is not to 
make them afraid of God, but only afraid of sin, 
— not to make them flee from God, but to bring 
them to him. And it is hard to convince men of 
this meaning, hard to make them believe, when 
they once fairly apprehend the evil in their own 
hearts, that that is just what God is aiming at; 
that that is just what he is anxious to cleanse 
them from ; that that very evil furnishes the bes? 
of all reasons why they should go to him instead 



234 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

of keeping away from him , that the very vileness 
which they deplore is the very thing on which the 
love and power of God are eager to fasten. Hence 
you often hear a penitent saying, u Is it possible 
that God is willing to receive one so deeply stained 
as I am ? He receives sinners, it is said ; but will 
he receive so great a sinner as I am ? " 

And the same thing is manifest in the Christian 
struggle after conversion. The Christian struggle, 
I say. No one need tell me that that seventh 
chapter of Romans describes the experience of an 
unconverted man, or at least of such an one only. 
Hear the apostle: "To will is present with me, 
but to do that which is good is not. The good 
which I would, I do not : the evil which I would 
not, that I practise. I delight in the law of God 
after the inward man : but I see a different law in 
my members, warring against the law of my mind, 
and bringing me into captivity under the law of 
sin which is in my members. O wretched man 
that I am ! who shall deliver me out of the body 
of this death?" I know nothing of Christian 
experience if just such a conflict as that is not in 
active progress in you and me ; if you and I can- 
not say with the French king, "Ah, those two 
men ! I know them well ; " if you and I are not 
distinctly conscious of two forces wrestling with- 
in us, the one of which makes for holiness and 
self-denial and meekness, while the other pushes 
desperately for pride and self-will and pleasure. 
And we cry out, like the apostle, "Who shall 
deliver us?" Is it indeed the will of God that 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 235 

we shall get the strong man armed out of our 
house? Is it not too great a thing to hope for, 
that this sin, which dogs our steps, and breaks our 
peace, and fights every good aspiration, and mines 
away under every good resolution, shall be gotten 
under our feet ? My friend, Christ is willing. That 
is just what he is aiming at, — that worst which 
is in us. Paul answers the "Who shall deliver 
me?" with "I thank God through Jesus Christ 
our Lord. Sin shall not have dominion over you." 
And now let us see how Christ's willingness 
comes out in the incident of our text. And, in 
the first place, you observe that Ms willingness 
is not repelled by an imperfect faith. This leper 
believed only in Christ's power: he did not be- 
lieve in his willingness ; he only wished or hoped 
he might be willing. Christ did not turn him away 
for that : he did not make him wait until his faith 
was better developed. It was a good deal for him 
to have come as far as to believe in Christ's power. 
That was farther than the possessed boy's father, 
at the foot of the transfiguration mount, had come. 
He was in doubt about Christ's power. He had 
tried the disciples, and they could not cast out 
the devil ; and so he turns to Jesus, saying doubt- 
fully, " If thou canst do any thing, have compas- 
sion on us." Christ did not say to him, " Go away 
until you can believe that I have the power." He 
seized on the possibility which the man's mind had 
admitted, and sought to develop it into faith. " If 
thou canst," say you ? " All things can be to him 
that believeth." And the man made a great step 



236 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

forward when he cried out, " Lord, I believe ; help 
thou mine unbelief." Thomas, the Lord's own 
disciple, was worse than either of these two. He 
wanted sensible evidence of his Lord's identity, 
and insisted on it in a most unreasonable and dis- 
agreeable way, at which Christ might have been 
justly offended ; but Christ was willing to give him 
even that, if he could only be brought to believe. 
You find illustrations of the same truth in the 
Old Testament; showing how God, instead of 
being offended by incomplete faith, seizes upon 
such as there is, and brings every possible appli- 
ance to bear, in order to strengthen it. Even 
Abraham, the Old-Testament type of faith, asked 
for a sign ; and Gideon asked for a second sign 
after God had given him one, and received it, 
with a third one in addition. God's willingness 
is shown pre-eminently in the means which he uses 
to strengthen faith, so that it may lay firm hold 
on his love and power. Because, after all, this 
willingness has a law and a limitation. It is not 
the reckless, undiscriminating kindness of a foolish 
father, who gives unconditionally whatever his son 
asks. God is willing to give us far more than we 
can ask, or are worthy to receive ; but then he 
makes faith the indispensable condition of his gifts : 
" Without faith it is impossible to be well-pleasing 
unto him: for he that cometh to God must believe 
that he is, and that he is a rewarder of those that 
seek him." Hence, I repeat, God's willingness is 
shown first of all in encouraging men to believe in 
his willingness. 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 237 

I cannot help thinking that Christ knew of the 
approach of this poor leper before the multitude 
did. The man ran a great risk in coming into that 
company, the more so as his condition was evident 
to every one. The disease was at an advanced 
stage. Luke the physician, whose eye was quick 
to note such facts, tells us that he was full of 
leprosy ; and yet his incomplete faith had power 
enough to nerve him to make the attempt to get 
to Jesus. I think the gracious Lord must have 
known that, and must have furthered his effort 
in some way of his own ; for that was a case after 
Christ's own heart. His compassion made him 
willing to heal the man's body, but his compas- 
sion went deeper than his body. He would fain 
heal his soul as well; and, in order to that, he 
must develop in him that faith without which 
there is no salvation. It was much that he be- 
lieved in Jesus' power. He must be taught also 
to believe in his love. The case of the woman 
who pressed through the crowd, and touched the 
hem of his garment, resembled this in some points. 
She believed in Christ's power so fully as to believe 
that it extended to his clothing; yet, like this 
leper, she seems to have had some doubt about his 
willingness. She would make the experiment by 
stealth. She did not count on Christ's knowing 
that power had gone forth from him ; and she was 
confused and frightened when found out, as one 
who had stolen something , but she received that 
day something of greater value than healing. She 
learned Christ's heart toward the afflicted. She 



238 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

never again would steal to him, trembling and 
afraid, after hearing him say, " Thy faith hath 
made thee whole. Go in peace." 

Christ's willingness was shown, further, in his 
express declaration. How striking is the way in 
which he meets that timid " If thou wilt " with 
" I will " ! The man's only doubt was relieved at 
once ; and not only by Christ's clear, ringing 
words, but by his extraordinary act in touching 
him. The leper knew very well, and the whole 
multitude knew, that to touch a leper was forbid- 
den by the law ; that a man contracted thereby a 
pollution as from contact with the dead. But here 
is a willing helper indeed, who, in his desire to 
save me, will break through the ceremonial law, 
and lay himself open to the inconvenience and the 
odium of ceremonial pollution. And let it be 
observed here, that nothing shows the good-will 
of Christ, his real, deep desire to save and help 
men, more than his readiness to come into contact 
with them. It is well for us to look at that fact 
from the stand-point of our modern habits and 
tastes. Neatness, cleanliness, order, the conceal- 
ment of every thing offensive, — these are not 
merely attributes of luxurious living, they are 
cardinal principles, first instincts of ordinary liv- 
ing and of common decency ; and it certainly is 
not open to question, that an exquisitely toned 
and susceptible nature, like that of our Lord, felt 
the full power of these instincts. And yet no one 
knew better than our Lord the power of those very 
instincts to separate the coarse and ignorant and 



A LEPERS LOGIC. 239 

diseased masses from the cultured and decent who 
should be their helpers. He knew very well how 
readily the poor and unclean man caught the im- 
pression that the cleanly, well-dressed man despised 
him, and wanted to avoid him. And the Saviour 
would never give room for that impression for a 
moment. Whatever curses the ignorant Jew might 
vent upon him, he never could say that he avoided 
him because of his poverty or his uncleanness. He 
never shrank from the contact of the filthy rabble 
which pressed round him, thrusting upon his atten- 
tion their deformities and hideous marks of disease ; 
and Christ's contact with such, Christ's hand laid 
upon the leper and upon the paralytic and upon 
the squalid children which poor mothers brought 
to receive his blessing, has been well-nigh as po- 
tent a sermon to the world as the Sermon on the 
Mount. 

And the fact takes on new meaning as a type 
of Christ's attitude toward moral pollution. As 
society is constituted, our contact with men is 
regulated very much by outward decencies. We 
cannot read each other's hearts ; and, moreover, we 
ourselves are simply imperfect men among imper- 
fect men. But here was the purest moral nature 
in earth or heaven, one who knew the whole mean- 
ing and vileness of sin, one to whom the shadow 
of evil was horrible ; and yet the story of his life 
is summed up in this, that he laid that pure nature 
right against the world's polluted heart; that 
he threw himself into the midst of a society, of 
which the most outwardly decent part was the 



240 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

most deceitful and corrupt, and touched that moral 
pollution as really as his hand touched the leper, 
in order to redeem and save it. This, I say, is the 
story of Christ's life, the expressive comment on 
his " I will " uttered to the leper, — " The Son of 
man is come to seek and to save that which was 
lost." 

And if you will go back to the old Mosaic law, 
and study the directions for the purification of a 
leper, as you will find them in the fourteenth of 
Leviticus, you will see what a beautiful figure 
they furnish of the provision made by divine love 
for the purification of a sinful nature. When the 
priest, on examination, had found the leprosy 
cured and gone, the patient was bidden to bring 
two birds. One of these the priest killed over an 
earthen vessel containing fresh spring-water, so 
that its blood should mingle with the water ; then, 
taking the other bird, with the cedar (the sign of 
preservation from corruption), the scarlet (the sign 
of fresh life), and the hyssop (the sign of purifica- 
tion), he dipped them, with the bird, into the min- 
gled blood and water, and then let the bird fly 
away. The letting loose of the bird was a symbol 
that the former leper was imbued with new vital 
energy, and released from the fetters of his dis- 
ease, and was now free to go where he would. 
The slain bird showed that the leper would have 
suffered death on account of his uncleanness but 
for the restoring mercy of God. As we look up 
from this strange rite in the wilderness in the 
shadow of the tabernacle, our eyes rest on Jesus 



A LEPER'S LOGIC. 241 

and the sinner. Tainted with the leprosy of sin, 
he must die bnt for the exercise of sovereign 
mercy, — must die, not from any arbitrary decree, 
but from the essential nature of sin, which poisons 
the fountains of life. That mercy is exercised 
through the shedding of blood: "Without shed- 
ding of blood is no remission;" and, as we look 
upon the bleeding fowl and the stream of its life 
mingling with the pure water, we turn to the cross, 
and see Him who came by water and blood, even 
Jesus Christ, "not with the water only, but with 
the water and the blood," which we see flowing 
together from His pierced side. As the symbols 
of preservation, fresh life, purification, are dipped 
into the blood ; so, as we look at the restored sin- 
ner, we see insured to him eternal life, purity, and 
vigorous power for ministry, through the touch of 
that blood upon his soul : and, as we mark the 
bird flying freely and gladly away toward its famil- 
iar haunts and companions ; so, through the blood 
of Christ, we see the sinner set free from bondage, 
called unto the liberty of the children of God, 
made free of the privileges and the companion- 
ship of the household of Christ. This is what 
Christ's " I will " means. It means a willingness 
which takes in his descent from the glory of the 
Father ; his taking upon himself the form of ser- 
vant ; his being made in the likeness of sinful 
flesh. The " I will " speaks from Simon's ban- 
queting-hall, where the sinner meets his tender 
forgiveness and recognition of her act of love ; 
from Bethany, as Lazarus steps forth from the 



242 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

grave ; from the shores of the lake, where the ra- 
ging demon departs at His word, and leaves the 
victim at Jesus' feet, clothed, and in his right 
mind ; from under the olives of Gethsemane, and 
down from the cross in the gathering darkness, — 
from these, and from every sinful, penitent soul 
saved, during all these centuries, through faith in 
his blood, come the echo of that gracious word to 
the leper, " I will." 

In our approaches to God, we must clearly rec- 
ognize the truth, that God has a will to bless us. 
The soul that cannot be convinced of God's good- 
will by his gift of Jesus Christ, cannot be con- 
vinced at all. When God had given the world 
Christ, he had nothing better to give it; for, in 
giving Christ, he had given himself: and hence 
the apostle well says, " He that spared not his 
own Son, but delivered him up for us all, how shall 
he not with him also freely give us all things ? " 
If that is true, if we have indeed a Father who 
is more willing to give good things to them that 
ask him than earthly parents are to give good 
gifts unto their children, — why should we not 
come near with confidence ? Why should not our 
lives be more richly dowered with spiritual gifts 
than they are? There may be one within the 
sound of my voice to-day, penitent for sin, with a 
contrite, broken heart, desiring to find Christ's 
rest, yet so burdened with a sense of guilt and 
unworthiness as to doubt Christ's willingness to 
receive him. Doubt no longer, my friend, as you 
hear this word from the Saviour himself : "I will : 



A LEPER'S LOGIC 243 

come, and be cleansed." There may be one almost 
discouraged with the fierceness and pertinacity of 
the conflict with inbred sin, tempted to give up 
the fight, asking, " Shall I ever gain the victory ? " 
Hear Christ this morning: "I will." He wills 
that you shall conquer. God's good-will is on 
your side ; and, if God be for you, who shall be 
against you ? What excuse can we possibly have 
for cherishing unwilling hearts in ourselves in the 
face of such willingness on Christ's part ? Depend 
upon it, if we are cold-hearted, bound down by sin, 
inefficient, worldly-minded, without power against 
temptation, it is not Christ's fault. He does not 
will to have it so. It is our fault that we do 
not encourage by prayer that faith which he has 
willed shall overcome the world. Depend upon 
it, if we live below our privilege, and are content 
with scanty spiritual gifts and attainments, it is 
because we have not grasped the riches of mean- 
ing in his " I will." You remember what Paul's 
conception of the will of God toward believers 
was, — a conception which he evidently thought was 
no vain dream, since he distinctly asked that it 
might become a fact in their lives : " For this 
cause I bow my knees unto the Father, from 
whom every family in heaven and on earth is 
named, that he would grant you, according to the 
riches of his glory, that ye may be strengthened 
with power through his Spirit in the inward man ; 
that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith ; 
to the end that ye, being rooted and grounded in 
love, may be strong to apprehend with all the 



244 A LEPER'S LOGIC. 

saints what is the breadth and length and height 
and depth, and to know the love of Christ which 
passeth knowledge, that ye may be rilled unto all 
the fulness of God." 



XIV. 
PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 



XIV. 
PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

" With all prayer and supplication praying at all seasons in 
the Spirit, and watching thereunto in all perseverance and sup- 
plication for all the saints, and on my behalf, that utterance may 
be given unto me in opening my mouth, to make known with 
boldness the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an am- 
bassador in chains; that in it I may speak boldly, as I ought 
to speak." —Eph. vi. 18, 20. 

THE whole of the latter part of this chapter, 
from the tenth to the twenty-first verse, turns 
on the fact of Christian conflict. This is a fact 
about which Paul has a good deal to say in differ- 
ent parts of his writings, and on which, evidently, 
he feels very strongly. Christians have a battle 
to fight, an enemy to overcome. The enemy is so 
strong and wily that no human power can re- 
sist him. The Christian must be clad in God's 
armor. Moreover, he must be armed at every 
point. Nothing less than the whole armor of God 
will avail. Not only so, the armor itself is valuable 
only as it is entire. It is of little consequence 
where the soldier is struck, if only he falls. 
Though his helmet may save him from a wound in 
the head, the enemy's purpose is gained if, in the 
absence of the breastplate, he can pierce his heart. 

247 



248 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

Christ's purpose includes more than the develop- 
ment or conservation of a single virtue in man. 
It contemplates the salvation of the whole man. 
God desires and means, not only to keep intact a 
Christian's faith or hope or zeal, but his life, — 
the Christian himself ; and a successful blow at 
either of these is a blow at that life. Moreover, 
the Christian qualities figured in this picture of 
complete armor can exist and thrive only in com- 
pany. Hope is nothing without faith ; readiness 
is nothing without hope ; righteousness is of faith 
only, and is nothing without truth ; while truth 
finds its highest expression in righteousness. Then, 
as the soldier, however well protected, is useless 
without his sword ; so Christian hope and truth and 
faith and righteousness get their highest sanction, 
and are taught their appropriate uses, by the word 
of God alone, — the sword of the Spirit. The 
word of God and the armor of God are as neces- 
sary to each other as the captain's orders are to 
the armed soldier ; in short, this passage of Holy 
Scripture will be of little use to us unless we study 
it entire, and possess ourselves of the unity of all 
the parts. 

Consequently, we cannot understand these 
words of our text about prayer unless we see how 
they are related to what goes before. Prayer is 
the divinely ordained means of intercourse with 
God. In all that precedes, we get no intimation 
of the personal contact of the Christian warrior 
with his divine Leader. This is given us in prayer. 
We have the word of God to the soldier ; but in 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 249 

prayer we have the soldier's word with God, the 
contact and communion of soldier and general ; 
and it is not without a purpose that the word of 
God and prayer are brought together here. The 
word of God gathers up into itself, expounds and 
interprets Christian truth, hope, faith, righteous- 
ness, readiness : but the word of God becomes a 
living power, something to strike and to slay with, 
only through the living contact of the Christian 
with Christ ; and this contact is afforded by prayer 
only. The word of God is to be to us, not simply 
an object, but an instrument. It represents the 
aggressive side of our Christian life. The world 
and Satan are to be not merely resisted : they are 
to be overcome. The gospel is to be not only de- 
fended and vindicated : it is to be pressed upon 
men's acceptance. The truth of its principles 
must be vindicated, but the principles themselves 
must likewise be made forces in society. As Chris- 
tians, you and I live to impress. Our Christian 
character is not merely something to be kept in- 
tact : it must also prevail with men, and bring 
them over into allegiance to the kingdom of God. 
Hence, it is not enough that we study the word of 
God, however critically ; it is not enough that we 
hold it in our memory ; it is not enough that we 
are kindled by its poetry, or convinced by its logic. 
It must pass into our life, be hidden in our heart, 
shape our character, and inspire our influence ; 
and this no mere word will do. Nothing but life 
can impart life : nothing but character can mould 
character. The Bible is chiefly valuable to us as 



250 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

it expresses to us the personal character of God. 
The Bible leads us to God ; but God must take us 
by the hand, and lead us back through the Bible, 
before we can gather the best out of it. It is 
prayer that puts our hand in God's. Those dis- 
ciples whom the risen Christ met on the road to 
Emmaus had read the old prophecies scores of 
times ; but they had never seen in them what came 
out under the talk of that stranger who made 
their hearts burn as he opened unto them the 
Scriptures. They knew why it was, when they 
found out who had been talking with them. And 
one of the strongest proofs of the need of prayer 
in the study of the Word is the fact, that so much 
of the Bible is convertible into prayer. How many 
of the Psalms, for instance, are prayers of them- 
selves ! How many of them you could make, with 
hardly a change, the forms of your communion with 
God ! Indeed, the best Bible-reading is prayer, in 
the sense of living contact and communion of the 
soul with God. 

Now, in our text, the apostle describes some of 
the laws and characteristics of prayer ; and these 
we will touch upon in the order in which he places 
them. 

First, then, we have a suggestion of the variety 
of prayer. All prayer is the same in essence ; 
but it takes on different modes, just as your inter- 
course with a friend does. One day you will sit 
down for a long conversation; another day you 
will simply exchange a word as you pass each 
other in the street; again, you call at his office 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 251 

on a matter of business, and the thing is settled 
in a few brief, pointed sentences. So with prayer. 
It is not all asking. Sometimes it is only inter- 
change, without any petition at all, — talking to 
God for the pleasure of communion. Sometimes 
it is a sharp, short cry for help, like Peter's " Lord, 
save me ! " when he felt himself sinking. Some- 
times it is merely the aspiration of the heart to 
God without a word, sometimes a half-conscious 
sympathy of thought with God, sometimes a for- 
mal public petition, sometimes a struggle to climb 
over self to God. We are to pray with every prayer, 
with all kinds of prayer. He is not always the 
most prayerful man who prays most regularly or 
most formally or most publicly. Sometimes more 
prayer is condensed into a sentence than is to be 
found in a whole series of prayer-meetings. I 
never can read, without emotion the story of the 
good old German professor who sat studying until 
far into the night, and then, pushing his books 
wearily aside, was heard by the occupant of the 
next room to say, ere he lay down to rest, " Lord 
Jesus, we are upon the same old terms." 

This truth is brought out more clearly in the 
next sentence, which suggests the seasonableness 
of prayer, — " praying in every season" or on every 
occasion. Some persons have been troubled by 
the familiar version, "praying always" and have 
asked very plausibly how it is possible for one to 
be always praying, if he is to do any thing else 
successfully. There would be no real difficulty, 
even if this rendering were correct. Paul bids 



252 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

the Thessalonians " pray without ceasing," which 
is even stronger. The difficulty disappears when 
we take a broader view of prayer as including the 
habitual contact of the life with God everywhere. 
But our text adds, to the hint of varieties of pray- 
er, that of occasions, which call out these varieties. 
Leisure gives opportunity for deliberate, medita- 
tive communion ; public worship, for formal suppli- 
cation, confession, and thanksgiving; dangerous 
emergencies, for sharp, short cries to God. A 
stately liturgical formula would have been of lit- 
tle use to Moses at the Red Sea, or to the Syro- 
phenician woman pleading with Christ for her 
stricken daughter. Every phase of a prayerful 
man's life suggests an occasion for prayer; and 
prayer has varieties enough for every occasion. 
Take the single fact of temptation, out of which 
this discourse of the apostle grows, and how many 
occasions for prayer it furnishes ! If Satan tempts 
in a variety of ways, he must be met with a variety 
of prayers. The apostle's point, in short, is that 
life is full of occasions and suggestions of contact 
with God, and that a Christian is to avail himself 
of these. Keep that thought of contact with God 
in mind as the key to the passage. Prayer puts 
you in contact. The moment that contact ceases, 
you are in danger and helpless. You have Christ's 
word for it : " Apart from me ye can do nothing." 
You want God everywhere ; you want his counsel 
in every thing ; your joy is incomplete, yea, empty, 
without his sanction and sympathy ; your sorrow 
is unbearable without his comfort ; your business 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 253 

lacks its one great element of success if God is left 
out of it ; you will as surely fall under temptation 
as you are human if God does not help you. Pray, 
therefore, with every kind of prayer, at every 
season. 

We find next in order a statement of the ele- 
ment and atmosphere of prayer, — " in the spirit." 
You know that a great deal of the effectiveness 
and general quality of work depends upon the 
element in which it is done. One cannot work 
equally well under all circumstances. There are 
certain conditions of the atmosphere, for instance, 
which seem to paralyze your brain : there are cer- 
tain close, hot, drizzling days when all your work 
is up-hill. There are certain people whose very 
presence freezes you, and makes you question 
whether you have an average amount of brains or 
of feeling. What we are, comes very largely out 
of our surroundings ; just as a taper gets much of 
the material for combustion out of the atmosphere. 
A light goes out in a vacuum. A swan cannot do 
his best in the air, nor an eagle in the water. So 
the power of prayer depends largely on the element 
in which it works. A man who thinks he has 
learned to pray when he has learned the forms of 
prayer, is greatly mistaken. The disciples learned 
very little when they heard the Lord's Prayer from 
the Lord's own lips. They had indeed a lesson- 
book in that prayer, and the lessons were deep as 
God's own heart; but those men, at that stage of 
their religious training, could not know what it 
meant to pray, " Hallowed be thy name ; thy king- 



254 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

dom come ; thy will be done." The hymn says, 
Christians 

"Learn to pray when first they live." 

So they do, but as a child learns the alphabet. We 
have to be trained in prayer as in every other 
department of Christian experience ; and one im- 
portant factor of this training is, to know in what 
element prayer will or will not work and prevail. 
The apostle tells us, that the only effective prayer 
is prayer in the spirit : and by this he does not 
mean prayer when one feels like praying, or, as we 
popularly say, " is in the spirit of praying ; " nor 
does he mean when one prays spiritedly, with 
enthusiasm and fervor ; but he means prayer under 
the impulse and direction of the Spirit of God. You 
remember that Paul, in that wonderful eighth 
chapter of Romans, tells us that we have a natural 
infirmity in prayer ; that we know not how to pray 
as we ought ; and that only the Spirit of God can 
help this infirmity, and teach us to pray. No won- 
der, then, that he says in our text, that it is not 
enough for us to use the varieties and occasions of 
prayer, but that we must also get into the element 
of prayer, and pray in the spirit. Otherwise, prayer 
is only an evidence of infirmity, like the dim burn- 
ing of a candle in foul air. Let us see briefly what 
the Holy Spirit does for prayer. 

First, it creates a prayerful heart. True prayer 
is the communion of a child with a father ; and 
this Holy Spirit is called the Spirit of Adoption, 
whereby we cry " Father." That is, the Holy 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 255 

Spirit creates a son's heart in us : " The Spirit 
himself beareth witness unto our spirit, that we are 
the children of God : heirs of God, and joint-heirs 
with Christ." That is the first thing. We never 
can truly pray at all until we can pray " Our 
Father ! " You see that we need the Spirit's aid, 
in order to utter the very first words of the Lord's 
prayer. 

Then, further, the Spirit suggests the substance 
of our prayers : " We know not what we should 
pray for." The Spirit searches our hearts, and lays 
bare their needs ; and these needs in turn drive us 
to the mercy-seat. 

Again, the spirit reveals the love and helpful- 
ness of God, and so encourages us to present 
these many and deep needs to him. We know 
God through Christ, it is said. True; but we 
know Christ fully only through the Spirit, which, 
while it convinces us of sin, likewise convinces us 
of his righteousness. 

The Holy Spirit also communicates divine love 
to our hearts. He reveals God, and gives us 
the spirit of sons ; and we say, " Behold what 
manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon 
us, that we should be called the sons of God." 
" We love him because he first loved us," and this 
love communicates warmth and enthusiasm to 
prayer. 

And once more, what is most wonderful of all, 
the Holy Spirit so identifies himself with our case 
that he makes intercession for us, — intercession so 
earnest that Paul describes it as " with unutterable 



256 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

groanings." In other words, God's own heart 
pleads for us ; and our mightiest plea is there. 

And now, as we move on, we are directed to 
the quality of alertness in prayer. Literally the 
the words are, " and being awake thereunto." No- 
tice that thereunto, for it is the key of the sentence. 
Watchfulness and prayer belong together, even as 
our Lord put them together ; and the word here 
falls in with what has already been said about 
occasions or opportunities of prayer. Watch there- 
unto ; that is, unto prayer, with reference to 
prayer. Keep watch over prayer. When Scrip- 
ture thus puts us on guard, we know that there is 
either a great danger to be averted, or a great 
treasure to be defended. In this case, there is 
both a treasure and a danger. We have already 
seen what a vital relation prayer sustains to the 
whole Christian life. Cut that great main which 
leads the water from the reservoir into yonder 
city, and how long will it be ere the city is in 
distress. Prayer is the medium of communion 
with God, and without that communion there is 
no Christian living ; and so the hymn has not put 
it too strongly : — 

"Prayer is the Christian's vital breath." 

There is no life without God, and no contact 
with God without prayer: so that, if Satan can 
cut that main, the life is in his power ; and the 
danger is linked with the treasure, as always. 
Value implies danger. The poor man's cabin is 
safe from thieves. The value of prayer, its vital 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 257 

importance to Christian life, makes it a centre of 
temptation. A wise general will silence, if he 
can, the battery which is doing his men the most 
damage ; and, if it be true, that — 

" Satan trembles when he sees 
The "weakest saint upon his knees," 

it follows that Satan will leave no device untried 
to keep that saint off his knees. As a fact of 
experience, the tendency to neglect prayer is in 
proportion to its importance. The excuses for 
such neglect are familiar to you all : the pressure 
of business, the unseasonable call, the concert or 
lecture or assembly on the prayer-meeting night, 
the mood of mind, — all these meet the Christian 
on the way to the mercy-seat, and delay Mm, or 
stop him altogether, until the roads to the closet 
and the family altar and the place of social prayer 
are grass-grown. 

Hence prayer is a thing to be watched, — 
watched as a habit to be encouraged by practice, 
as a pleasure with which the Christian is to grow 
into a sweet familiarity by frequent communings 
with Him in whose presence is fulness of joy, as a 
duty which he neglects at the peril of his spiritual 
life. We should watch for occasions of prayer, 
cultivating the habit of associating every detail of 
our life with God. Often we are so placed that 
our seasons for prayer must be brief. So much 
the more need of distributing the communion over 
the day. Your friend in the adjoining office is as 
busy as you are. You cannot either of you find 



258 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

time to sit down for a long chat; but there are 
frequent opportunities in the course of the day, 
if you are on the lookout for them, to exchange a 
word, or a sign of recognition. There is a good 
deal of cheer sometimes in a friend's nod, or in 
the wave of his hand. We may often exchange a 
word or a look or a thought with God when we 
cannot stop for a long interview. Men who are 
travelling much, and can seldom sit down to a 
meal, learn to eat by the way. Again, we ought 
to watch before prayer. The best prayer comes 
out of the best life. We ought to try to live so 
that prayer shall not come in as something foreign 
to our life, but rather so that our life shall run 
naturally up into prayer. Prayer and life should 
be of one piece. If we watch our lives, to hold 
them close to God, our prayer will be simply 
another form of our life. Sometimes we hear the 
complaint, that social meetings for prayer are 
spiritless and heavy ; and the explanation which 
is most readily caught at is, that the leader of the 
meeting does not understand his business. But 
while this may be true, the difficulty is more likely 
to lie with those who are led, in that prayer has 
to overcome the terrible inertia of the prayerless 
lives which they bring to the house of God. 

And we must watch after prayer, to see what 
becomes of our prayers. He would be a strange 
archer who did not look to see where his arrow 
struck, a strange merchant who did not care 
whether his richly freighted ship arrived at her 
port or not. If we pray, we pray presumably for 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 259 

something; and if that something never comes 
into our lives, if our prayers never come back to 
us in the shape of blessings, it is time we were on 
the watch. David, in the fifth psalm, says, "I 
will direct my prayer unto thee ; " but adds, " and 
will look up." 

That this watching is to be persistent, u in all 
perseverance," follows naturally from what has 
been said. The conflict with temptation is a life- 
long one ; the necessity for prayer never ceases : 
" Long as they live should Christians pray ; " and, 
therefore, the necessity for watchfulness never 
ceases. 

And now, finally, the text directs us to the 
objects of prayer. Prayer must not be selfish. 
It is the language of the kingdom of God ; and the 
kingdom of God is a community, a brotherhood. 
Prayer is the expression of the life of God's king- 
dom, and that life is social. We must pray for 
ourselves ; but we must pray, also, for each other, 
for the whole brotherhood of God, "for all the 
saints." Christ himself teaches us to say, " Our 
Father, give us bread, forgive our debts ; " and it 
is with our prayer just as it is with our life. We 
never learn the true sweetness and richness of life 
until we have learned to live for others, and we 
never reach the true blessing of prayer until we 
have learned to pray for others. Such prayer re- 
acts to make our prayers broader and stronger and 
richer. It gives prayer a wider range, touches it 
into a quicker sympathy, and pervades it with a 
deeper emotion. 



260 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

And while prayer is to be made by the Church 
for the whole Church, it is also to be made directly 
and specifically for the leaders of the Church, for 
the ministers of Christ, " and for me," says Paul ; 
and he hints at some of the reasons why special 
prayer should be made for him and for the class 
which he represents. They have to proclaim un- 
popular truths. They preach Christ crucified ; and 
he is to the Jews an offence, and to the Greeks 
foolishness. Hence they need courage. They are 
tempted to hold back the truth. They need prayer, 
that they may make known the truth with bold- 
ness. Then, too, the truth they preach is a deep 
and far-reaching truth. Preaching deals with the 
infinite ; its theme is God in Christ, the mystery 
of the gospel, — truth which no man can handle 
unless he be taught of God. To bring that truth 
home with power to the infinite varieties of mind 
and character with which he has to deal, he needs 
the wisdom from above, which God gives only to 
those who ask in faith. He must ask this for 
himself; but if the church of Christ is at one 
with him, in the loving and saving intent of his 
ministry, they will ask it for him. The strongest 
bond between a pastor and his people is their 
mutual prayer. I know that we all preach in- 
effectively at times. I know that there is a large 
class of society which emphasizes the foolishness of 
preaching, and assumes that preaching is nothing 
but foolishness. But it is too much overlooked, 
that preaching is a thing in which the people as 
well as the preacher have a share and a responsi- 



PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 261 

bility. When a minister has prepared and preached 
his sermon, that service is not complete unless to 
the sermon the prayers of the people are added. 
Those prayers give a thrust and a momentum to 
a sermon which all the preacher's intellect and 
eloquence and piety cannot give. A sermon with- 
out the people's prayers is shorn of half its power. 
And it will turn out, I have no question, when 
things shall be seen in the clearer light of another 
world, that a very large part of the ineffectiveness 
of preaching has been due to the prayerlessness of 
the people. That eagle, with his strong wings, 
and his light body framed to cut the air, could 
not rise if there were no atmosphere for his wings 
to beat against. Neither will a sermon rise and 
fly to its lodging-place in men's hearts if the 
prayers of the people do not bear it up. Paul 
called himself an ambassador in chains. He spoke 
literally. He was chained by the hand to a pre- 
torian soldier. But many a minister of Christ is 
equally an ambassador in chains, hampered and 
fettered by the lack of his people's affectionate 
and fervent prayers for him and for the Word he 
preaches. You remember how Israel prevailed in 
fight so long as Moses held up his hands ; but his 
hands were weak, and would have dropped, but 
that Aaron and Hur stood by his side, and held 
them up. 

Pray, therefore, Christian brethren ! Pray with 
all kinds of prayer ; pray on all occasions ; pray 
in the power and unction of the Holy Spirit; 
mount guard over prayer. Pray for all the saints, 



262 PRAYER AND PANOPLY. 

pray for the ministers of the Word. This will 
round and complete the Christian panoply. The 
old fables tell how the gods used to make armor 
for their favorite warriors, and bring it to them, 
and set it up for their admiration and encourage- 
ment. This armor of God is set up before your 
eyes by God's messenger. It is no creation of 
fable. These gifts of truth, salvation, hope, right- 
eousness, faith, are real defences against the ar- 
rows of the kingdom of darkness ; but they are of 
little avail without prayer. Without prayer, you 
and I will be no more to the church of Christ, no 
more against the wiles of the Devil, than yonder 
mailed statue on its pedestal. 



XV. 

THE DAYSMAN. 



XV. 

THE DAYSMAN. 

" For he is not a man, as I am, that I should answer him, and 
we should come together in judgment. 

" Neither is there any daysman betwixt us, that might lay his 
hand upon us both." — Job ix. 32, 33. 

AT this point of the poem, we are seeing Job 
at his worst. He has become desperate 
under his accumulated miseries. His three friends, 
instead of giving him the sympathy and tender- 
ness which his wretchedness craves, take the atti- 
tude of mentors, mete out to him reproach instead 
of comfort, and, assuming that his trouble is God's 
visitation for some secret sin, ply him with appeals 
to humble himself and repent. Conscious that 
he has hitherto served God faithfully, Job indig- 
nantly denies and fights this cool assumption of 
his guilt; but, in fighting away from this, he is 
pushed back upon another question, which takes 
on larger and larger proportions as he confronts 
it: "If I am not afflicted because of my guilt, 
as I refuse to believe, why am I afflicted ? " Why 
are righteous men everywhere afflicted? The old 
current theology of his day had but one answer 
to give, — the answer elaborated by Bildad in the 

265 



266 THE DAYSMAN. 

previous chapter, — God is just: therefore he must 
send prosperity upon the good, and affliction upon 
the bad. You are afflicted: therefore you are 
guilty. Job, like many another man, had ac- 
cepted that answer until he came to apply it to 
his own case ; and then he found it would not 
work. What an epoch it is in a man's thinking, 
when he first finds himself compelled to doubt 
and to challenge the long-accepted, first positions 
of his thought. How completely at sea he is for 
a while. The old moorings are swept away: to 
what can he tie up ? The main movement of this 
poem is the working out of just such a problem as 
this. In the present chapter, Job answers Bildad. 
He admits that God is just ; but from his infinite 
justice, holiness, and power, he concludes that the 
best man has no hope of being approved by him, 
and runs into a passionate and wicked outbreak 
against the Almighty, the amount of which is, that 
God is simply an arbitrary tyrant, laughing at the 
despair of the innocent, and giving over the earth 
to the rule of wicked men. 

This protest he clothes in the figure of a legal 
trial. God comes into court, first as plaintiff and 
then as defendant ; first asserting his rights, snatch- 
ing away that which he has a mind to claim, then 
answering the citation of the man who challenges 
his justice. In either case man's cause is hope- 
less : " He taketh away, and who can hinder him?" 
If the subject of his power calls him to account, he 
appears at the bar, only to crush the appellant, and, 
with his infinite wisdom, to find flaws in his plea. 



THE DAYSMAN. 267 

As we push our way towards the storm-centre of 
this whirlwind of passion, we find that it is not 
utterly chaotic. At first feebly, vaguely, timidly, 
certain lines strike out, growing more firmly drawn 
and more definite in direction as the poem unfolds. 
Certain deep-lying instincts begin to take shape in 
cravings for something which the theology of the 
day does not supply. The sufferer begins to feel, 
rather than see, that the problem of his affliction 
needs for its solution the additional factor which 
was supplied long after in the person and work of 
Jesus Christ, — a mediator between God and man. 

Let ns note, in the first place, the peculiar facts 
in Job's case which call out this desire. The point 
of his complaint, as we have already seen, is, that 
with the natural infirmity and fallibility of his 
race, for which he is not responsible, he stands no 
chance in trying conclusions with an infinite God 
whose wisdom charges even the angels with folly, 
and in whose sight the very heavens are not pure. 
As he sees it, plaintiff and defendant have no 
common ground. God is a being different in 
nature and condition from himself. He is far 
withdrawn, in his infinite majesty and holiness, in 
a realm of pure intelligences, ruled by different 
laws from those prevailing in this scene of confu- 
sion. He sees man's weakness and error, only from 
this stand-point. If, now, there were a human side 
in God ; if his adversary were a man who knew 
human life and the human heart and the pressure 
of earthly limitations from actual experience, — 
then, says Job, I could come into court with him 



268 THE DAYSMAN. 

with some chance of justice. Or, if this might not 
be ; if there were only some daysman, some arbiter 
or mediator who could lay his hand upon us both, 
who could understand both natures and both sets 
of circumstances, who should know both the 
earthly and the heavenly economy ; if there were 
but such an one to stand between us, and inter- 
pret, and reconcile the one to the other, and compel 
whichever of the two is wrong to do the other 
right, — then all would be well. 

It is wonderful, it is most pathetic, this bitter, 
pitiful wail wrung from a tortured heart in those 
far-ofT times , this cry for that better thing so fa- 
miliar to us, and which we owe to the gospel of 
the Son of God, — a mediator who lays his hand 
on both God and man. And this leads us to ob- 
serve, that this desire of Job's is to be studied, 
not merely as the experience of an individual 
under peculiar circumstances, but as a human 
experience, the germs of which are in man as 
man ; in other words, Job's craving for a media- 
tor is the craving of humanity. Natural instincts, 
indeed, are not infallible guides ; but they are 
truthful suggesters. In the material world, it is a 
familiar enough fact, that the indication of a want 
is the indication of a supply somewhere. Supply 
and demand answer to each other. The channels 
which run up the trunk of a tree are infallible 
signs of the tree's need of moisture, and are 
answered by the streams which run among the 
hills. A bird's wing implies air; the human 
tongue, palate, and stomach imply food ; the ear is 



THE DAYSMAN. 269 

nothing without sound, nor the eye without light. 
Shall we say that this law ceases to hold from the 
moment we quit the material world ? " Nature," 
says one, " is true up to the heart of man : shall 
nature suddenly become a false prophet then ? " 
The cravings of the human heart for love, for 
sympathy, for masterdom, for an object of worship, 
for knowledge, — do not these declare that the 
heart was made for these, and that somewhere in 
the scheme of things there are answers and sup- 
plies for these needs ? 1 If not, might we not well 
ask with the Psalmist, " Wherefore hast thou made 
all men in vain ? " Not a demonstration, indeed ; 
but does not the groping of the human soul in all 
ages and places for a God, at least suggest that the 
soul was made for God, and more than hint at the 



1 " It is altogether unlikely that man spiritual should be vio- 
lently separated, in all the conditions of growth, development, 
and life, from man physical. It is indeed difficult to conceive 
that one set of principles should guide the natural life, and these, 
at a certain period, — the very point where they are needed, — 
suddenly give place to another set of principles altogether new 
and unrelated. Nature has never taught us to expect such a 
catastrophe. She has nowhere prepared us for it. And man 
cannot in the nature of things, — in the nature of thought, in the 
nature of language, — be separated into two such incoherent 
halves. . . . After all, the true greatness of law lies in its vision 
of the unseen. Law in the visible is the invisible in the visible ; 
and to speak of laws as natural is to define them in their appli- 
cation to a part of the universe, the sense part ; whereas a wider 
survey would lead us to regard all law as essentially spiritual. 
To magnify the laws of nature as laws of this small world of 
ours is to take a provincial view of the universe. Law is great ; 
not because the phenomenal world is great, but because these 
vanishing lines are the avenues into the eternal order." —Henry 
Drummond : Natural Law in the Spiritual World. 



270 THE DAYSMAN. 

existence of a being to meet these outstretched 
hands, and take them tenderly into his own ? 

Or Christ : has Christ been arbitrarily forced 
upon the world to make his own place ? or is there 
a place ready for him in the human heart ? Is 
there no eternal relation between Christ and the 
world's need ? Why is he called the " desire of all 
nations ? " The need of Christ is not an artificial 
need, created by conditions of knowledge and civil- 
ization : it is a need embedded in the very struc- 
ture of humanity. Christ meets an existing need. 
Manhood was made for Christ. When antiqua- 
rians, digging in the ruins of some old city, come 
upon the half of a beautiful statue, they are at 
once stimulated to search for the other half. 
There are limbs and feet and a body, which 
want a head and shoulders to complete them. 
When these are found, it is evident enough that 
the two parts belong together ; so, when Christ 
comes, it is evident enough that there is a vacant 
place which it was meant he only should fill. He 
was meant for humanity ; but, equally, humanity 
was meant for him. And with Christ goes this 
fact of mediation. Mediation is not a dogma of 
theologians merely. It is not an invention. It is 
not an ingenious contrivance to get round or over 
the two tremendous facts of a holy God and a sin- 
ful humanity. It meets a human need and a 
human craving just as truly as Christ himself 
does. There is a place for mediation in man's 
relations to God. There is a craving for mediation 
in the human heart to which Job here gives voice. 



THE DAYSMAN. 271 

One needs but a moderate acquaintance with the 
history of religion, to see how this instinctive long- 
ing for some one or something to stand between 
man and God has asserted itself in the institutions 
of worship. What is the idol but the expression of 
the Pagan feeling that the Supreme Being, what- 
ever or wherever he be, is too remote from the 
sphere of human life and suffering to be available ? 
What are all attempts to figure or to symbolize the 
divine, but confessions that man wants God trans- 
lated into the terms of his own humanity ? What 
is the lesson of that kneeling figure beneath the 
cathedral arches, with eyes upturned to the image 
of the Virgin-mother, but that that heart knows no 
way to God save through a nature like its own ? 
Men talk as if the incarnation were a thing utterly 
monstrous, — a miraculous, arbitrary break into the 
law of humanity ; seeming to forget that incarna- 
tion is a demand of humanity ; that, from the very 
beginning of human history, men have been striv- 
ing to cast their conceptions of God and of God- 
like qualities into forms or symbols which appeal 
to flesh and blood. Job simply tells over again 
the old, old story of the human heart ; this, name- 
ly : God is so remote, the conditions of his being so 
exceptional, his majesty and power so transcend- 
ant, that direct approach to him is impossible unless 
in something or some one the two lives and the two 
conditions meet and blend, so that a daysman may 
stand between, with one hand on weak, ignorant 
man, and the other touching the divine throne 
itself, and interpreting the one life to the other. 



272 THE DAYSMAN. 

This demand for a mediator is backed and urged 
by two great interlinked facts, — sin and suffering. 

Job's question here is, How shall man be just 
with God? While he sturdily protests his inno- 
cence of any conscious, wilful sin which deserves 
this affliction, he never for a moment denies his 
participation in the common moral infirmity of the 
race; and his trouble lies just there. He urges 
that man as he is cannot be just with God as he 
is. Let him be as good as he may, his goodness is 
impurity itself beside the infinite perfection of the 
Almighty. And, really, it is hard to see how, from 
Job's stand-point, he could reach any other conclu- 
sion ; hard to see how any man could evade Job's 
difficulty who should try to solve this problem 
with only these two factors, — a righteous God, 
revealed in nature, and a man, imperfect and err- 
ing by his own nature. In other words, if Christ, 
and all that Christ reveals of God, are dropped out 
of the question, and the question is simply God's 
approving recognition of man's merit, I do not 
know that Job puts the case any too strongly. 
Divine omniscience must detect spots in the best 
obedience of human hands. It " dares not appear 
before the throne." God cannot listen to any plea 
of man based on his own righteousness. It must 
break down, and the man must needs condemn 
himself out of his own mouth. 

Hence Job's mind, groping round for the un- 
known quantity in this problem, was feeling its 
way in the right direction when it struck upon 
this thought of mediation, as was shown later, 



THE DAYSMAN. 273 

when God made that thought the very centre and 
basis of the Levitical system. Between God and 
man stood the priest, typically with his hand upon 
both. No man went direct to God with the bur- 
den of his sin. Some one must receive his gift, 
and place it on the altar, and send it up in fra- 
grant smoke to heaven. Now, the priest turns 
towards God, entering within the veil with his 
hands laden with incense, and there, in the awful 
secrecy of Jehovah's pavilion, making atonement 
for sin ; while the fragrant incense-clouds in wrap 
the golden cherubim, and hover over the mercy- 
seat. Again he turns toward the people, and lays 
his hands upon the head of the scape-goat, confess- 
ing over it the people's sin, and sending the beast 
away to wander in the desert, — strange, uncon- 
scious type of a nobler victim, mysterious, un- 
conscious bearer of a nation's guilt. Thus turning 
now to God, now to the people, himself compassed 
with infirmity, bearing the names of the tribes ever 
graven in sparkling gems upon his heart, touched 
with compassion for the ignorant and for them 
that are out of the way, yet admitted to the very 
presence-chamber of Jehovah, — he stands, the first 
divinely ordained type of the daysman, appointed 
for men, in things pertaining to God. 

You do not need to be told how beautifully the 
writer to the Hebrews depicts Christ as the reality 
answering to this type ; and a blessed reality we 
find him when we face Job's old problem, How 
shall man be just with God? and come with our 
sins to his bar, to hold controversy with him. 



274 THE DAYSMAN. 

Throw Christ out of the controversy, and we say, 
" How can I hope for sympathy or compassion at 
the hands of this terrible holiness ? What can it 
do with sin but condemn it ? What with the sin- 
ner but punish him ? Here am I, weak and erring 
by nature, compassed about by all sorts of tempta- 
tions, my mind held down to earth by the neces- 
sity of earning my own bread and my children's. 
I am overworked, overstrained, often sick, irrita- 
ble, petulant ; and I make, at best, but a bungling 
business of a spiritual life. I might urge these 
things in extenuation of my case if God were a 
man as I am ; but how can I expect him, a being 
so infinitely superior, seated on the inaccessible 
heights of this pure heaven, with a nature to which 
sin cannot appeal, — how can I expect him to con- 
cern himself with these toils and hindrances and 
burdens of mine ? " Thank God ! I can say to 
such an one, " He is a man." I point him to God 
manifest in the flesh. Between God's pure spir- 
itual essence and you stands Christ, tempted and 
tried like as you are : an High Priest enrolled 
among men, and, as a man, able to u have com- 
passion upon the ignorant, and upon them that are 
out of the way." He knows by actual contact the 
power and seductiveness of evil ; he knows by 
actual experience the hardest and most heavily 
weighted side of life : and he is touched, not only 
with the knowledge, but with the feeling, of your 
infirmities. No depth of sorrow so low that he 
has not been down there ; no road so rugged or 
thorny that he has not walked every step of it; 



THE DAYSMAN. 275 

no agony of pain so intense that he has not been 
racked by it. And so, as yon come to God by 
him, you learn that your Judge is also your sym- 
pathizer. In coming to God, " the Judge of all," 
you find that you come to " Jesus, the Mediator, 
the Daysman of a new covenant." You learn 
through him, the Incarnate Word, what you never 
could learn so well from any written word, that 
the God who moulded this dust knoweth the frame 
which he has made, remembereth that it is dust, 
cares for every grain of that dust, and pitieth 
them that fear him, even as a father his children ; 
for even they that fear him — his most reverent, 
most loyal sons and daughters — have need of pity. 
This Saviour, this Son of man, in whom thrills the 
very life of God, is able to come down to where 
we are, and say to us, "God is just what I am. 
He that hath seen me hath seen the Father." 

So of forgiveness. Clean I surely am not, and 
never can be, in God's sight. Moral perfection 
in him I may admire from a distance, as I would 
some glittering snow-peak of the Caucasus ; but it 
is a different matter when I come to climb, and 
try to find a refuge for my frailty in that perfect 
beauty of holiness. Sinful as I am, how can I 
hope that he will forgive ? What can I bring to 
win his grace ? " Will the Lord be pleased with 
thousands of rams, or with ten thousands of rivers 
of oil?" Nay, "He hath showed thee, O man, 
what is good ; and what doth the Lord require of 
thee, but to do justly, and love mercy, and walk 
humbly with thy God ? " What, indeed ! Is this 



276 THE DAYSMAN. 

a slight requirement ? Truly, to fill it out were 
even harder than to bring the thousands of vic- 
tims. To do justly, love mercy, walk humbly, — 
that may seem to some an easy thing ; but, when 
a man has once caught sight of God's holiness, as 
Job had, and has learned God's ideal of justice, 
mercy, and humility, he is not unlikely to reach 
Job's conclusion. What shall I do, then ? How 
shall I bear his hand upon me ? Even while I ask, 
it is upon me ; and lo ! it is a pierced hand, scored 
with the mark of the nail ; and I hear a voice : 
" What the law could not do, in that it was weak 
through the flesh, God, sending his own Son in 
the likeness of sinful flesh and as an offering for 
sin, condemned sin in the flesh : that the ordinance 
of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not 
after the flesh, but after the spirit." Thus I learn 
that this terrible, holy God so loves and cares for 
me that he is anxious to forgive me, — so anxious 
that he becomes a man, in order that I may see 
divine, forgiving love translated into human linea- 
ments and human deeds and human words. Christ 
says to me, "I offered this life because of your sins. 
This hand upon you is God's hand ; and the voice 
which speaks to you is God's voice, saying, 4 If you 
confess your sins, he is faithful and just.' y ' Mark 
that. Not one jot of that awful justice abated; 
yet still faithful to forgive your sins, and "to 
cleanse you from all unrighteousness. , ' Through 
him I learn not only how a penitent soul may urge 
confidently its plea at the divine bar, but how it 
may be fully justified by faith, and have peace 



THE DAYSMAN. 277 

with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. The 
forgiveness of sins. Every sabbath we repeat it, 
" I believe in the forgiveness of sins," until it 
has become a commonplace. But it is well some- 
times to look beneath these commonplaces, and 
see what they cover. Do we realize how much it 
means for God to forgive sin ? Do we realize of 
what infinite value the revelation and mediation 
of Christ are in making that an article of faith? 
Do we realize, as Job did, how hopeless it is to 
seek to draw from Nature, which never forgives, 
any comfort or teaching concerning the tender and 
just dealing of infinite holiness with a finite and 
erring man ? 

Again, this craving for a mediator is awakened 
by human experience of suffering ; a fact which is 
intertwined with the fact of sin. This poor, tor- 
tured patriarch ! Truly, from the Christian stand- 
point, he is one of the most pathetic spectacles in 
all history: no knowledge, no dream, of Christ; 
no hint of such knowledge of God as is possible 
only through Christ ; no hint of divine sympathy 
or of loving purpose in affliction. Take up your 
own bitterest sorrow, and go back with it to the 
ash-heap on which Job sits, and put yourself as far 
as possible in his place. Shut out the view of the 
Christ on whose pierced hand you have dropped 
your tears, while you have leaned against his heart, 
and heard him whisper the higher lesson of sorrow, 
— and will you wonder that Job broke out into 
passionate despair? Will you wonder that his 
heart cried out for just that which has been so 



278 THE DAYSMAN. 

ineffably precious to you ? Take his view of God 
as his own magnificent words describe him, — over- 
turning the mountains, and sealing the stars, and 
striding upon the heights of the sea, and bring- 
ing this tremendous energy to bear in afflicting a 
poor, weak son of man, — and do you wonder that 
he cried out for some one to stand between him 
and that awful power and holiness? Ah! there 
was no one to stand by Job, and say, "Look on 
me. I am purer than thou art, yea, spotless and 
sinless as God himself ; yet it pleased the Lord to 
bruise me. Behold my hands and my feet. Thrust 
thy hand into my side. Sit down here, and let me 
tell thee of Gethsemane and Calvary, of agony such 
as even you never endured. You cannot under- 
stand this. You are shut up within the narrow 
conception of affliction as punishment and retribu- 
tion. I can show you, by my life and character, 
how suffering ministers to perfection. I can show 
you how, on that hard soil watered with tears, 
grew up the manhood which is the world's pattern, 
the world's hope, and the eternal joy and glory of 
heaven." Christ steps forth from the darkness 
which veils Calvary, and says to the great host 
of the suffering, " Here is suffering which is not 
retribution, suffering which is not the outpouring 
of divine wrath, suffering ministered by perfect 
love, and issuing in power and purity." I say 
again, we need, our poor humanity needs, such a 
daysman, partaker of both natures, the divine and 
the human, to show us suffering on its heavenly as 
well as on its earthly side, and to flood its earthly 



THE DAYSMAN. 279 

side with heavenly light by the revelation. The 
transfigured and the crucified Christ — Christ who 
had not where to lay his head, and Christ to whom 
every knee shall bow — are one and the same. 
Suffering and glory blend in him into greater 
glory, and through him God's suffering servant 
learns that he suffers with him that they may be 
glorified together. In him we have the human 
experience of sorrow and its divine interpretation. 
Job's longing, therefore, is literally and fully 
met. To the cry which comes from that far-off 
wreck of earthly happiness, " He is not a man as I 
am," we can answer to-day, " He is a man." To 
the words, " There is no daysman to lay his hand 
upon us both," we answer, " There is one God, and 
one mediator between God and man, — the man 
Christ Jesus." It is the fashion to decry this doc- 
trine of mediation ; to say that there is no reason 
why man should not go directly to God with his 
sin and his suffering ; that God is loving and mer- 
ciful, and ready to forgive. But it is sometimes 
forgotten how much of the knowledge and convic- 
tion of God's love and mercy are due to Christian 
revelation. It will not do for us to receive our 
ideas of pardoning love through Christ, and then 
to turn our backs on Christ ; and I think that this 
Book of Job serves, among other purposes, to 
bring before us the picture of a man with all the 
moral light of his time, with a moral character 
indorsed by God himself, and show to us how 
utterly helpless and hopeless such a man is in his 
relations to sin and suffering without Christ, how 



280 THE DAYSMAN. 

his soul craves just such a mediator as Christ is. 
" The craving to see God, and to hear him speak 
to us, is," as has been well said, " one of the primi- 
tive, inherent, and deepest intuitions and necessi- 
ties of the human heart. No student of Job can 
well believe that any thing short of a supernatural 
revelation and a mediator both human and divine, 
can satisfy the needs of such a creature as man in 
such a world as this." Thus, this oldest of books 
has its lesson, enforced and confirmed by the gos- 
pel, for us of this latter day, — the lesson of the 
need of a mediator. You need him when you come 
to face the fact of your own sin. You will feel 
your need of him more, the more clearly you shall 
see into the terrible foulness and wide, destructive 
reach of sin. You will need him to assure you of 
God's willingness, yea, eagerness, to receive and 
pardon, when, broken with contrition, you fear to 
trust a holy God for forgiveness. You need him 
to accomplish the work of pardon. You cannot 
bear the burden of your sin alone. You cannot 
render an equivalent to divine justice. God must 
be just because he must be true to himself; and 
so there is nothing for you but either to bear the 
penalty, or to let some one come in between you 
and God who can bear it for you, and say to you, 
" Go in peace." O my friend ! talk not of mere 
morality as answering this deepest need and crav- 
ing of your humanity. You speak of the Sermon 
on the Mount and its pure morality, and say that 
is your model. You need no mediator : you will 
live by that. Do you remember who gave you 



THE DAYSMAN. 281 

that code ? and do you not see that the personal 
Redeemer and Saviour is behind and through that 
code, and that it is practically ineffective without 
him ? Do you not see, that, if you take Christ's 
mediation from behind that code, it takes on the 
semblance of the old tables of the law, that the 
Mount of Beatitudes without Christ the Mediator 
is a veritable Sinai clothed with lightnings ? That 
perfect code, so holy, just, and good, — think you, 
you will dare take your unaided keeping of it into 
court with the God who framed it, and without 
the Christ who effectuates it, and be justified? 
God forbid } t ou should try the experiment ! 

And you need him in the sorrow of which, 
sooner or later, all are partakers. Divine love in 
clouds and hurling bolts is an awful, inexplicable 
mystery without this Daysman : with him sorrow 
is interpreted, and what seems to be wrath ap- 
pears as pure love. 

Despise not this Mediator. Seek his interven- 
tion. Come and lay the burden of your sin and 
of your sorrow alike on him ; and it shall be with 
you as in the words of Elihu, — " Thou shalt pray 
unto God, and he will be favorable unto thee : and 
thou shalt see his face with joy : for he will ren- 
der unto man his righteousness." 



XVI. 

THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 



XVI. 

THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

" For when by reason of the time ye ought to be teachers, ye 
have need again that some one teach you the rudiments of the 
first principles of the oracles of God ; and are become such as 
have need of milk, and not of solid food." — Heb. v. 12. 

THERE are two clearly defined lines of teach- 
ing in the New Testament, which, on a hasty 
view, might seem to be contradictory. In the one, 
great stress is laid on being childlike. Our Lord 
is heard saying, " Whoso shall not receive the 
kingdom of God as a little child, he shall not 
enter therein;" and, "except ye be converted, 
and become as little children, ye shall not enter 
into the kingdom of heaven." Moreover, he in- 
sists on this quality as a condition of spiritual 
knowledge, and thanks the Father that he has 
hidden the great truths of the kingdom from the 
wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto 
babes. On the other hand, we read such words 
as these : " That we may be no longer children, 
tossed to and fro and carried about with every 
wind of doctrine ; " and again, " Therefore let us 
cease to speak of the first principles of Christ, and 
press on unto perfection ; " and once more, " Till 

285 



286 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

we attain unto the unity of the faith, and of the 
knowledge of the Son of God, unto a fullgrown 
man, unto the measure of the stature of the ful- 
ness of Christ." 

The two are not contradictory, but are, rather, 
in complete harmony. They are only different 
sides of one and the same truth. On the one side, 
a Christian is never to lose the simplicity, the 
trustfulness, the guilelessness, of childhood. His 
growth must always be in the direction of these. 
If being as a little child is a condition of entering 
the kingdom of God, it is equally a condition of 
abiding in that kingdom. If a Christian does not 
grow in his sense of helplessness, and of depend- 
ence upon the power of God and the sympathy of 
Christ, he does not grow in the right direction. 
But, on the other hand, Christian life, like natural 
life, implies progress. No man receives the ful- 
ness of the kingdom of God at once. There is an 
infancy and a childhood of Christian experience ; 
a feeble grasp of faith before the stronger grasp ; 
an imperfect spiritual seeing before the clearer 
vision; ignorance of the weakness of the human 
spirit and of the devices of Satan, which gives 
way before the results of larger experience ; su- 
perficial conceptions of the word of God, which 
are slowly replaced by firm apprehension of that 
Word as spirit and life. As in the family, the 
child, from being taught, gradually grows into 
a position of authority, from being directed by 
others, becomes self-determining, and has a voice 
and an influence in the counsels of men; so, in 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 287 

the great family of God, Christian maturity and 
its accompaniments are recognized facts, — attain- 
ments which the gospel treats not merely as privi- 
leges, but as obligations. There is a Christian 
manhood, in short, which is expected and required 
of the child of God, in which, from being a recipi- 
ent of gospel influences, he is to become their 
defender, their illustrator, and their propagator. 
This is the truth for our consideration. It is 
embodied in these words of the text, addressed 
to those who had been for a good while under 
gospel training : " Ye ought to be teachers." Let 
us look at — 

The duty of being Christian teachers ; 

The reason for that duty ; 

Some specific features of that duty. 

Ye, as followers and disciples of Christ, ought 
to be teachers. One reason why Christ found it 
expedient to go away in person from the world, 
was, that the number of teaching-centres might be 
multiplied. If he had remained in the world, and 
depended upon his own personal instructions for 
success, he would have reached comparatively few. 
Instead of this, he sent the Holy Spirit, not con- 
fined to place, but working simultaneously at 
many points, in order to inform the hearts and 
minds of men, and to make every Christian, in 
some sense, a teacher. As plainly as words could 
speak, he laid the burden of diffusing the gospel 
upon his church. " Ye," he said to his disciples, 
" ye are the salt of the earth. Ye are the light of 
the world." Men are taught by the gospel that 



288 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

their responsibility does not cease with their own 
salvation ; that they cannot live out their Chris- 
tian lives simply with reference to God and to 
themselves ; that, from the fact of their being 
members of society, they exert power for good or 
for evil over other lives ; that they cannot be 
Christians, and not teach. 

And that which is a necessity, growing out of 
the laws of human contact, Christ wants every 
Christian to take consciously into his life as a 
principle, and conscientiously to use and improve 
that necessity for the extension of Christian truth 
and the development of Christian life. 

Thus the position and duty of each Christian, 
as a teacher, are laid down among the very rudi- 
ments of the gospel. " Ye ought to be teachers." 

But this duty is here urged by one considera- 
tion merely, to which we may confine ourselves. 
The familiar rendering, "for the time, ye ought to 
be teachers," entirely obscures the force of the 
passage. One would naturally draw from it the 
sense of "for the time being;" as if the duty of 
Christian teaching were a temporary matter or a 
thing of special occasions, instead of being of per- 
manent and universal obligation. The meaning 
is, rather, " by reason of the time ; " that is, be- 
cause you have been for a long time under Chris- 
tian influence, listening to Christian doctrine, 
versed in Christian experience : by reason of the 
time which has passed since you became Christian 
disciples, you ought to be teachers. Here there 
is the plain statement of a general principle : that 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 289 

Christian knowledge and Christian experience ought 
to be so developed by time as to become instructive 
and helpful to others. 

Time is an element of all growth ; and, wherever 
there is growth, we expect fruitage as the outcome 
of time. We are surprised and disappointed if the 
man who has been for a score of years engaged in 
business remains the mere petty shopkeeper he 
was at the first, and does not become a power in 
trade, a creator of new industry, a maker of wealth. 
We do not expect the apprenticed mechanic to be 
always an apprentice or an underling. Time is 
needed to teach him how to handle tools, and to 
make him acquainted with the capacity of mate- 
rials : but, with the time, we expect to see him a 
master-workman ; we look for him to develop new 
resources out of his material, and new methods of 
treating it, and thus to become a teacher to his 
craft. The man who through all his years is 
merely acquiring knowledge, and does not come in 
process of time to give it out, may be a prodigy of 
learning, but he is also a prodigy of uselessness, 
no better than so much lumber. And the same 
principle runs up into the moral and spiritual realm, 
and prevails there. There is, as I have said, an 
infancy and a childhood of Christian life in which 
we may expect to see uncertain walking, crude 
conceptions of truth, unwise zeal, and undisciplined 
character; but we have a right to be astonished 
and dismayed, if, after years of experience, that 
character is no less crude than at the beginning. 
When time brings to Christian character nothing 



290 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

but childhood, we are entitled to regard it as we 
regard the second childhood which waits upon 
human age. We have a right to expect, as the 
result of years, larger and clearer views of truth, 
better denned conviction, more self-mastery, more 
practical efficiency, and more consistency of life. I 
know that the mere passage of time does not bring 
all this to pass. Age and maturity are not the 
same things ; but the gift of time in the Christian 
economy is accompanied with a charge and obliga- 
tion to redeem the time. Time is a trust. You 
remember Peter's words: "If ye call on him as 
Father, who without respect of persons judgeth 
according to each man's work, pass the time of 
your sojourning in fear: knowing that ye were 
redeemed with the precious blood of Christ." In 
other words, the time of life is to be passed in 
godly sobriety and activity, because life has been 
redeemed at the price of Christ's blood; and life 
thus redeemed is a sacred trust to be accounted for 
to our Father, God, who is a strict judge of every 
man's work. The same truth is brought out in 
the parable of the talents. The element of time 
enters there. Time is given to the several ser- 
vants, as well as five and two talents ; and time 
enters into the general reckoning. The time given 
is an element of the responsibility : " After a long 
time, the lord of those servants cometh, and reckon- 
eth with them ; " and then it appears that time, in 
the Lord's mind, meant business, exchange, invest- 
ment, profit. The servant who had failed to catch 
this meaning, and had given his time to something 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 291 

else than his talent, found himself in sovry plight 
at the end. The man who represents mere time is 
one of the most pitiable of spectacles. The simple 
fact that he is old entitles him to no respect 
beyond that which common humanity pays to 
weakness. Old age is one of the loveliest things 
in this world when it stands in front of an earnest 
life, during which it has gathered sweetness out of 
sorrow, charity out of contact with men, and wis- 
dom out of experience ; but old age divorced from 
character is not even respectable. And, if that is 
true in general, it is pre-eminently true in the Chris- 
tian sphere. It is a sad thing when a man has 
been before the world for long years as a professed 
follower and disciple of Christ, and when all he 
has to show for it is that he is very old. Length 
of days, be it remembered, is in the right hand of 
wisdom. 

And now let us look at a few of the points in 
which, by reason of time, a Christian ought to 
be a teacher. 

He ought to be a teacher by reason of a ma- 
tured faith, and that under three aspects : — 

1. In respect of his own assurance of Christian 
truth. A man, in this age, who does not encounter 
much that is fresh and even startling in this depart- 
ment, can hardly be said to be alive. One who, 
in the course of an average life, has not changed or 
modified some of his views of Christian truth and 
doctrine, can hardly be said to have grown. A 
great deal of the truth of Scripture is given germi- 
nally, as a seed which keeps throwing out new 



292 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

growths in the course of years. The Saviour said 
that there were things which his disciples could 
not understand at the time, but which would be 
clear to them later. God often gives a central 
core of truth, and then leaves it for human research 
to formulate the truth. For example, he lays down 
the truth, that all things were made by him ; 
that the universe is ultimately the result of his 
creative will. Science investigates, and attempts 
to explain the physical facts of creation. The 
Bible gives us no information about God's methods. 
Science may discover the method if it is able ; and 
it is reasonable, that science should give us new 
light on these methods, and should modify or 
change our views concerning them. To all that 
new light, we may rightly open our windows. All 
that we are asked to hold by as Christians is that 
core of truth, that our Creator, and the world's 
Creator, is the ever-living God. So the integrity 
of the Bible, as the word of God, is a distinct thing 
from certain questions about the Bible. It is not 
affected by the showing of biblical criticism that 
Solomon did, or did not, write the Book of Ecclesi- 
astes, or Paul the Epistle to the Hebrews, or that 
the Pentateuch was, or was not, made up of a series 
of documents. On such questions, we have a right 
to hold ourselves open to all the light which ear- 
nest scholarship can give us ; and it would be 
strange indeed if some of our traditional views 
were not greatly modified, or even entirely changed. 
But we profess to be Christians, and by that 
profession we avow our faith in a certain body of 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 293 

truth. Its elements, indeed, are few and simple, 
but they are fundamental; and our Christianity 
takes all its character and all its meaning from 
them. Our Christianity, if it has any meaning at 
all, means Christ, the divine Son of God, and not a 
mere man like ourselves. It means Christ taking 
our human nature on himself, Christ living in our 
world, Christ crucified, Christ risen from the dead, 
Christ ascended to heaven and living there forever, 
and Christ the Judge of quick and dead. It means 
God, our Creator and everlasting Father, and the 
presence and energy of the Holy Spirit. It means 
salvation through faith in a crucified Redeemer. 
Whatever leaves this out is not Christianity. To 
the w oiid, these may still be open questions ; to us 
as Christians they cannot be open questions, any 
more than the foundations of a house can be left 
to be finished while the superstructure is going up. 
The whole superstructure takes its shape and its 
security from the foundations ; and whatever Christ 
may be to others, if he is not the chief corner-stone 
of our moral and spiritual life, that life has no set- 
tled basis and no consistency. And if our Chris- 
tian profession during all these years has been 
any thing more than a name or a form, if it has 
been, as our very profession implies, a living, gen- 
uine experience of the saving power and daily 
grace and sympathy of Christ, we ought by this 
time to have reached settled convictions on these 
points. We cannot be teachers otherwise. True, 
effective teaching is bound up with the teacher's 
conviction of the truth. Teaching is something 



294 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

more than repeating lessons from books. In every 
kind of teaching, success is measured by the degree 
in which the truth has become a part of the teacher 
himself. A truth suffers even by the advocacy of 
a man whom it does not possess. And this is 
pre-eminently true of Christian teaching. The 
instructive power of the gospel resides very 
largely in the lives which it shapes and pervades 
and propels. The life is the light of men. Ye 
ought to be teachers, but ye will not be if the 
gospel is still an open question to you. Ye will 
not be if your attitude towards its foundation- 
truths is that of suspense. 

You know and acknowledge the power there is 
in profound conviction. In the discussion of social 
or political questions, you know how deeply you 
are often moved, even by a man who represents 
what you do not believe, but who himself believes 
it with his whole heart, and speaks out of the 
abundance of his heart. Conviction carries power. 
And, I repeat, this is not a matter of words only. 
Most of you, if you teach at all, will do it more 
by your life than by your words ; and you cannot 
keep your life apart from your conviction of Chris- 
tian truth, or from your want of conviction. If 
your basis of Christian life is an open question, 
the uncertainty and suspense will get into your 
living. The New Testament recognizes a direct 
relation between faith and conscience. Paul writes 
to Timothy that "the end of the charge is love 
out of a pure heart and a good conscience and 
faith unfeigned ; " and Peter told the council at 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 295 

Jerusalem that God cleansed the heart by faith. 
And therefore faith which purifies the heart and 
the conscience is the mainspring of right living ; 
for out of the heart are the issues of life ; and 
weakness or vagueness of faith will get into the 
conscience, and will issue in weak and vague liv- 
ing, and therefore will take out of the life its great 
power of witnessing. Paul, in that same letter to 
Timothy, tells us how well such faith as that 
worked for teaching, — " The end of the charge is 
love out of a pure heart and a good conscience 
and faith unfeigned : from which things some hav- 
ing swerved have turned aside unto vain talking ; 
desiring to be teachers of the law, though they 
understand neither what they say, nor whereof 
they confidently affirm." 

2. Again, time ought to develop faith, in the 
sense of spiritual discernment, — clearer perception 
of the things of the unseen world. That is some- 
thing different from a man's feeling that he is 
growing old, and realizing that his friends are 
dropping around him, and that he must soon die. 
Any man will be made to feel that in the course 
of nature. The seaman may see the rocks and 
shores fast falling behind, and hear the roar of the 
surf, and yet have no outlook ahead. The outlook 
is one of the great things in Christian experience. 
As by reason of the time the old scenes and the 
old friends fall into the background, we ought to 
be getting clearer views of the great moral and 
spiritual truths which have their roots in the 
unseen world, and a deeper sense of their impor- 



296 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

tance and power. It is not strange if a young 
Christian simply believes in the things which are 
not seen. It is strange if the older Christian does 
not feel the power of the world to come. It is one 
thing to assent to the truth that " the things which 
are not seen are eternal ; " it is another thing to 
apprehend that truth, and to take it into life as a 
working principle ; to realize that the things on 
which heaven stamps a value — love and faith 
and purity and truth and good conscience — are 
the paramount things, and to make every thing 
give way to these. 

That kind of spiritual seeing has a teaching 
power. It is of the very essence of all teaching 
that the man who sees what we do not see, brings 
us to his feet to learn. When we want to know 
about the stars, we go to the scholar who has the 
telescope. And the life which one lives by faith 
in the unseen, teaches. It does what all true 
teaching must do, — it excites attention, it awak- 
ens inquiry, it communicates enthusiasm. Paul 
says, " Our conversation, or our citizenship, is in 
heaven." The stranger who tarries among us for 
a little while, born of another race, subject to 
another government, clad in another costume, 
receiving his instructions from beyond the sea, 
all his hopes and interests centring in that coun- 
try which he sees with his mind's eye, all his 
expectation converging towards his return thither, 
— that stranger is a marked man. He awakens 
our curiosity to know something of his country 
and institutions; and, as we talk with him, we 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 297 

catch something of the flavor of that land which 
we never caught from the descriptions of our 
geographies. A ripened Christian, with his citi- 
zenship in heaven, brings to us in like manner the 
flavor of the heavenly world. The world learns 
how a man may live and thrive on meat which 
they know not of; learns the power there is in 
those heavenly qualities of meekness and faith, 
and poverty of spirit, which seem to it so puerile ; 
learns how he can endure as seeing Him who is 
invisible. A quality steals into his life and words 
which gives the worldly man hints of a country 
strange to him, and a subtle attraction gets into 
his life which affects the most world-hardened 
heart. 

3. And time ought to have ripened faith in the 
sense of restfulness. We count it strange if natu- 
ral manhood does not bring with it increased com- 
posure, tranquillity, balance. Shall we count it 
any less strange if, with the lapse of time, Chris- 
tian manhood does not become better poised, more 
restful and quiet, less easily thrown off its balance ? 
Have we not had experience enough of God's 
strength to make us settle down on it, and trust it? 
Have we not found out so well how much better 
he can take care of us than we can take care of 
ourselves, that we have learned, not only to put 
ourselves in his hands on occasion, but to stay 
there all the while, and to be uneasy only when we 
do not feel the pressure of the Everlasting Arms ? 
That kind of restfulness has a teaching-power. 
You know how naturally, in any time of danger or 



298 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

confusion, all eyes turn to the man who is calm 
and self-poised. Even the gay, dissolute heathen 
poet had learned to admire the man just and firm 
of purpose, and eloquently pictured him as one 
whom neither mobs, nor the frown of tyrants, nor 
the wrath of storms, nor even the world falling in 
ruins, could disturb ; 1 but a higher lesson is taught 
by him who can say, " Who shall separate us from 
the love of Christ? shall tribulation or anguish 
or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or 
sword ? Nay, in all these things we are more than 
conquerors through him that loved us. For I am 
persuaded, that neither death, nor life, nor angels, 
nor principalities, nor things present, nor things 
to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor 
any other creature, shall be able to separate us from 
the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus our 
Lord." We are seeking rest. These men who have 
come to Christ, and have found rest, have power to 
teach us, and to tell us where to find it. We 
Christians, who by reason of time should have 
entered deeply into this rest, ought to be teachers. 
By reason of the time, a Christian ought to 
have been confirmed in the habit of communion 
with Grod. Our hymn says, that " prayer is the 
Christian's vital breath," and that he learns to 
pray, as to breathe, when first he lives. That is 
true. But you know that an infant's breath is 
feeble. Prayer is a subject of discipline. No man 
learns all its resources at once. No man learns how 

i Horace, Ode 3, b. III. 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 299 

to pray as lie ought all at once. To a young Chris- 
tian, prayer is commonly a matter of systematic 
observance ; and that is a good thing. It is a part 
of his training in the art ; but it usually takes 
time to make prayer the atmosphere of the life, 
and communion with God the habit of the soul. 
A young Christian is very likely to call in God 
after he has done his very best in something, and 
has found his own strength fall short. A ripened 
Christian begins by assuming that his own strength 
is perfect weakness, and so calls in God at once. 
I have somewhere seen a little story of a king who 
had employed some people to weave for him, had 
supplied them the materials and the patterns, and 
had told them, that, if they were ever in trouble 
about their work, they were to come to him with- 
out fear. Among those at the looms was a child ; 
and one day, when all the rest were distressed at 
the sight of the tangles in their yarn, they gath- 
ered round the child, and asked, " Why are you so 
happy at your work ? These constant tangles are 
more than we can bear." — " Why do you not tell 
the king ? " said the little weaver. " He told us 
to, and that he would help us." — " We do," replied 
they, " at night and at morning." — "Ah ! " said the 
child, " I send directly whenever I have a tangle." 
Brethren, we ought to have reached that point by 
reason of time, — that habit of referring every- 
thing at once and directly to God ; just as, when we 
are walking with a friend, we naturally refer to 
him every matter of interest as it comes up. That 
habit of communion with heaven sets its mark on 



300 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

the life and invests it with a teaching-power. If 
one draws from cultured associations a quality 
which impresses itself on other minds in a way 
they cannot understand, surely familiar converse 
with heaven will impart its quality to a Christian. 
Cowper's lines are worth quoting : — 

" When one who holds communion with the skies 
Has filled his urn where those pure waters rise, 
And once more mingles with these meaner things, 
"Tis e'en as if an angel shook his wings : 
Immortal fragrance fills the circuit wide, 
And tells us whence these treasures were supplied." 

By reason of time, a Christian should have be- 
come a teacher in the matter of habitual consis- 
tency of life, obedience, and docility. 

Surely, surely, though the patience of God is 
wonderful, and the grace of God abounding, we 
should not continue in sin that grace may abound. 
True, we shall be erring mortals to the very end, 
compassed about with infirmity. True, no day 
will ever pass but that, to the prayer, " Give us 
our daily bread," we shall need to add, " Forgive 
us our debts." But certainly, by reason of time, 
we should have gained some power over tempta- 
tion in the course of our experience of temptation. 
We should have learned to keep habitually away 
from the paths where we have stumbled and fallen. 
It is strange, something is wrong, if we are still 
committing and repenting of the same old sins 
which we began to fight long ago. As the lines of 
that living epistle which we began writing when 
we entered Christ's service creep farther down 



THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 301 

the page, they ought to be more fairly and even- 
ly written. In short, though we shall never be 
perfect men and women, though the nearer we get 
to Christ, the less we shall be pleased with our- 
selves, — yet we ought to be better men and women 
by reason of the time, and, by our better living of 
the gospel, be teachers to those about us. 

And, by reason of the time, we ought to be 
broader in our charity. Our own experience 
ought to have given us an insight into our own 
weakness and fallibility, and to have made us cor- 
respondingly tolerant of the weakness and falli- 
bility of our brother men. Where we have 
stumbled so often, we shall not jeer when a brother 
stumbles. It was to those very Christians who 
had made the greatest attainments in the Christian 
life, that Paul referred for restoration those who 
should be taken in a fault : " Ye which are spirit- 
ual, restore such an one in the spirit of meekness." 
He knew that real spiritual maturity, so far from 
making one censorious and self-righteous, turned 
him upon his own heart to consider its weakness, 
and made him the best and most sympathizing 
helper to his fallen brother. 

Ye ought to be teachers. There ought to be 
more fruit of Christian maturity in the church of 
Christ. How a church, made up largely of Chris- 
tians who have tasted the good word of God and 
the powers of the world to come, and in whom 
years have wrought, along with Cod's processes of 
discipline, to compact and balance and ripen char- 
acter, — how such a church ought to tell on the 



302 THE LESSON OF RIPENESS. 

community ! — a church of teachers as well as of 
learners, teaching by godly life and conversation ; 
teaching by the poise and symmetry of charac- 
ter ; teaching by calm courage and steady persist- 
ence ; teaching by the power of a faith which links 
their life with the principles, the motives, the joys, 
the aims, and the hopes, of heaven; teaching by 
their solid grounding in the word of God, and in 
the great truths of redemption : this is no fanciful 
ideal, no chimera of a religious enthusiast. It is 
the pattern of a Christian church held up by in- 
spiration itself. The word of the apostle comes to 
us this morning (God grant it may come with 
fresh meaning under the power of the Spirit !) : 
" That we may be no longer children, tossed to 
and fro and carried about with every wind of doc- 
trine, by the sleight of men, in craftiness, after the 
wiles of error ; but speaking truth in love, may 
grow up in all things into him, which is the head, 
even Christ." 



XVII. 

STRENGTH, VICTORY, AND KNOWL- 
EDGE IN YOUTH. 



XVII. 

STRENGTH, VICTORY, AND KNOWLEDGE 
IN YOUTH. 

" I write unto you, young men, because ye have overcome the 
evil one. ... I have written unto you, young men, because ye 
are strong, and the word of God abideth in you, and ye have 
overcome the evil one." — 1 John ii. 13, 14. 

COUNSEL is the prerogative of age. Chris- 
tianity is pre-eminently an experience. That 
which is most quickening in it is born of experi- 
ence ; and experience, in its turn, is born of years. 
It is not strange, therefore, that the venerable 
John should assert the privilege of his age, no 
less than of his position, in writing to young 
men. These are Christian young men whom he 
addresses. They have overcome the Evil One, and 
the word of God abideth in them. Nevertheless, 
they are not, for that reason, beyond the necessity 
of wise counsel. Youth may, and does often, serve 
Christ loyally ; but it cannot fully appreciate the 
quality and reach of Christ's mastery. Youth may 
be taught, and may believe, that Christ's person 
and truth are the very core and kernel of all life 
and of all history ; but time alone makes them 
realize that Christ not only fits everywhere, but 

305 



306 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

gives the law everywhere. Youth may be told, and 
may acknowledge, that the world passeth away; 
but it does not feel it, and especially it does not 
feel that the desire of the world is passing away. 
Age knows that it is passing away, because, for it 
so much of the world has already drifted out of 
sight ; and therefore the claims of the will of God, 
as against the love of the world, come with no such 
emphasis as from the lips of age. 

But we are concerned this morning, not so much 
with the counsels of this aged and beloved apostle 
as with the assumptions which underlie them, and 
which, as it seems to me, are quite out of the line 
of our popular Christian sentiment. 

For we commonly look upon youth as a season 
of tutelage. Whatever we may concede to it, — 
and we concede very much, as will shortly appear, 
— we regard it as unripe. Even from the religious 
stand-point, we look upon youth as militant, rather 
than as victorious. The fight with the Evil One is 
upon them ; but the victory, we take for granted, 
is in the future. We are disposed to be lenient 
when the Evil One gets the upper hand for the 
time. We do not expect them to have the word 
of God abiding in them, to be possessed by the 
spirit and power of the Word. We accept the 
partial and remittent influence of the Word upon 
them as a necessity of their age. We know they 
are strong; but we do not expect them to be strong 
in God, and in the power of his might. 

Are we right in this view of the religious possi- 
bilities of youth ? Certainly not, if our apostle is 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 307 

right ; for this assumption of ours directly contra- 
dicts his. He addresses the young men as strong, 
as having overcome the Evil One, as having the 
word of God abiding in them. Is he thinking of 
a few exceptional young men ? He does not put 
the matter in that way. He writes to the Chris- 
tian youth of the Church generally. If he had said 
only, "Ye are strong," we might have construed 
his words to mean merely the native freshness 
and vigor of youth ; but his words are of spiritual 
strength, spiritual knowledge, and spiritual victory. 

The question, therefore, is very pertinent, whether 
we are justified in looking for only a crude, feeble 
Christian development in youth; whether we do 
not set the standard too low, and therefore encour- 
age them to do so. 

Now, in fact, we reason just as John does, when 
we look at youth in its relations to society. On 
that side, we frankly recognize their strength, vic- 
tory, and susceptibility to truth. As for strength, 
young men are accepted as important factors in 
the active and aggressive relations of life. They 
are invited to posts of responsibility ; they occupy 
positions of trust in business ; they come to the 
front in politics ; men put their legal tangles into 
the hands of young lawyers, and intrust their 
own and their children's lives to young physi- 
cians. 

In like manner we assume their ability to re- 
ceive and apply the teachings of human wisdom. 
They come under the power of the great masters 
of thought ; they are set to study Plato and Aris- 



308 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

totle and Kant in the schools ; they discuss among 
themselves the theories of political leaders; they 
read with zest the writings of great scientists ; the 
word of a Huxley, a Tyndall, a Spencer, abides in 
them, and shapes their thought. They are trained 
by the masters of painting and music ; they appre- 
ciate the pictures of Murillo and Raphael, and the 
harmonies of Beethoven and Wagner. 

So of victory. Youth overcomes. It wins vic- 
tories in the world of mind. It gains the world's 
ear, and helps to shape the world's opinions. The 
history of great literary successes is largely a his- 
tory of youthful triumphs ; it displays an intel- 
lectual vigor equal to its physical power ; it faces 
great problems of practical life, and solves them ; 
it makes a place for itself in spite of obstacles. 
In the secular sense, it does overcome the world. 
Youth exhibits a strong individualism. There is 
no parent who has not at some time awaked, as 
out of a dream, to the fact that the children, whom 
he had been wont to regard as mere reflectors of 
his opinions and practice, have developed a quality 
of self-assertion and self-determination ; that they 
have formed opinions of their own, and are moving 
upon lines of life and thought quite different from 
his ; that they are no longer integral parts of his 
life, but distinct units. And, as time goes on, he 
finds that these self-determinations are not mere 
caprices, but that they have direction and con- 
sistency, and work themselves out to definite re- 
sults. In short, we admit that strength, victory, 
mental receptiveness, and power of assimilation, 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 309 

are characteristics of youth, as such, apart from all 
its moral relations. 

After we have thoroughly taken in this fact, we 
may be disposed to look again at John's words, 
and to ask why the fact should not hold equally 
on the moral and religious side of youth : in other 
words, why youth, who are susceptible to the best 
thoughts and principles of masters in science and 
art ; youth, who win intellectual and social and 
material victories ; youth, who are strong on every 
other side, — should be only half-mastered by the 
word of God, devoid of all spiritual definiteness 
and force, and mere defeated weaklings in the 
greatest of all battles, — the battle with tempta- 
tion and sin. 

The text, then, does certainly assert two things : 
first, That youth is a power; second, That it is 
a power for holiness. And I hold its teaching, 
therefore, to be, that we have a right to expect 
of our Christian youth, Christian vigor, Christian 
knowledge, and Christian victory. Let us look at 
each of these points. 

I write unto you, young men, because ye are 
strong. There may be strength without maturity. 
People act upon that principle everywhere. A 
man who wants a good horse looks out for a young 
horse. A lady who wants an active and useful 
servant does not seek for an old man or woman. 
Not only so, but we expect real and telling ser- 
vice from youth. The business man who employs 
a young man as cashier or book-keeper gives over 
those departments of the business to him, and 



310 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

expects that the books will balance, and that the 
finances will be kept in order. He does not expect 
him to be a weak, nerveless, unreliable element in 
his business, always making mistakes, and requir- 
ing to be helped on by older men. He takes him 
as a power. Ought the case to be any different 
in the church of Christ? Young men, I know, 
cannot fill all places in the church, even as the 
book-keeper cannot fill the place of the capitalist ; 
but there are places which they can fill, and where 
we have a right to expect that they will be powers. 
The work of instruction and of counsel may be left 
to maturer Christians ; but the work of the church 
is not confined to instruction and counsel. It has 
an aggressive side, where strength is in demand. 
The work of pushing the gospel into new fields, 
of bringing other youth under its influence, of 
carrying on benevolent and missionary enterprises, 
is work which young men and women can do. 
You show that you can do it when you undertake 
it. An organization, formed and sustained by 
young ladies in this city, has issued in a reading- 
room for messenger-boys, which harbored some- 
thing like a thousand of these little fellows in one 
year. There were heathen scattered along this 
avenue and elsewhere in the city. You young 
men were urged to try and bring them under 
Christian influence ; and you went out, and sought 
the Chinaman in his laundry, and brought him 
here, to teach him to read, and to speak our 
tongue, and to tell him of Christ. You have done 
it, and you are doing it ; and I doubt if even yet 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 311 

you wholly appreciate the reach of your work, or 
the fact that you have quietly addressed your- 
selves to the practical solution of a problem which 
has occupied the attention of the church councils, 
without waiting for thern. 

There is a small hospital in this city where little 
or no provision was made for religious services. 
Last winter I found that two or three young men 
— one of them, at least, a member of this church, 
and I am not sure but all of them — had quietly 
taken the matter in hand, and were regularly hold- 
ing services there ; and I learned, too, of the ability 
and efficiency with which they were doing that 
work, and how eagerly their coming was looked 
for each week by the inmates of those wards. 

Yes, you are strong ; and the church of Christ 
lays claim to your strength. You came into the 
church to serve, not to be entertained. When you 
came before these altars, to profess your allegiance 
to your Lord, he met you there, and asked you to 
put your strength at his disposal ; and, if you do 
not recognize that claim, you are blind to your 
duty. If you do not respond to it, you are untrue 
to the Christ whom you profess to serve. Service 
is not to be an incident of your Christian life : it 
is to be its law, as it was the law of Christ's life. 
The sooner you accept the truth, that as Christians 
you live for other people, the sooner you will be 
down upon the firm, hard base-rock of the gospel 
theory of life. Some one once said, that a high- 
wayman demands your money or your life ; but 
Christ demands your money and your life. I 



312 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

would have you recall the words which were read 
to you when you professed your faith before the 
church : " We are now receiving you to take part 
with us in maintaining the honor of the church 
of Christ, and in the defence of the faith once 
delivered to the saints." I beg that you will not 
think those words meaningless. We conceive that 
Christ and his church do you honor by inviting 
you, not as children to be pleased and amused, 
but as strong to help us in our fight against the 
Devil. 

But the question is not only of Christian work : 
it is also of Christian character lying behind the 
work, and inspiring it. There can be no good 
work without good character. Here we see, that 
the strength of which John speaks is the strength 
which comes of the abiding of the word of God 
in the heart, and of victory over evil. He assumes 
that youth may have fixed principles, positive, 
religious character, and victory over temptation : 
" Ye have overcome the evil one." Youth's record 
may include moral victory. And here we are 
dealing with fact, and not merely with theory. 
Youth, as we very well know, is not characterless. 
Strong traits, positive, definite tendencies, emerge 
in the very child. A moral bias in one or the 
other direction reveals itself very early, and often 
with a force which neither discipline nor punish- 
ment seems able to control. Youth is susceptible 
to bad influences, — takes them in, is shaped by 
them. Is it not likewise susceptible to good ones ? 
Bad character in youth is a positive and acknowl- 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 313 

edged fact. Is not good character in youth equally 
a fact? Evil in youth overcomes good influences. 
Is it impossible that good in youth should over- 
come evil influences? So far as religious prin- 
ciple is a matter of knowledge and training, the 
great truths of morals and religion are as easily 
comprehended by the child as the principles of 
arithmetic and grammar which he learns in the 
school. The child of five years may, and often 
does, learn them, and apply them successfully to 
the conquest of his little temptations, which have 
as much moral significance as the mightier and 
subtler allurements addressed to the mature man. 
As a fact, Ave see that young people, very young 
people, do develop positive religious character. 
With all the sneers at early piety, early piety is a 
blessed fact. And why not? It is very evident 
what youth can do in the way of victory over self 
and temptation, when a great worldly end is to be 
gained. How many young enthusiasts in art will 
deny themselves to the last pinch, in order to go 
abroad, and, when there, will resist temptations to 
self-indulgence, and live in a garret on a pittance, 
while they are studying music or painting ! How 
many a young man, in order to acquire a college 
education, will stint himself in the very necessi- 
ties of life, and imperil eyes and health, and bear 
the sneers of fops at his poor clothes ! He gets 
his education, he overcomes ; and are we to say 
that the young Christian, with Christ's inspiration 
in his heart, and Christian influences around him, 
and God behind him, shall not take up the great 



314 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

crosses of Christian service, and practise its grand 
self-denials, and resist and overcome the world, 
the flesh, and the Devil? Shall not his youth 
already have scored some victory over evil, and 
have developed some determinate character and 
some fixed principles against which the floods of 
temptation shall break in vain? Are we to as- 
sume that youth must be always weak and van- 
quished on its moral side ? Must we admit that 
the Devil is always stronger than youth, and 
weaker than ripe manhood only? To do this is 
to give the lie to Christ's words about Heaven's 
interest in the little ones. It is to say, that, while 
God suffers the fight with temptation to come with 
all its fury upon youth, he gives the victory only 
to ripe age. And the Bible biographies, at least, 
do not tell us that story. A large proportion of 
the great moral slips recorded in Scripture have 
been made by middle-aged and old men : Noah, 
Job, Lot, Moses, David, Solomon, Elijah, Peter, 
are startling comments on the truth that moral 
weakness is peculiar to no age ; while, on the 
other hand, young Joseph, young David, young 
Saul, young Samuel, young Ruth, young Josiah, 
young Timothy, — all testify that moral strength 
and victory are peculiar to no age. No : John is 
right. He does not assert too much when he 
says, " Ye have overcome the evil one." If youth 
can be Christian, it can overcome. If it is truly 
Christian, it will overcome ; for Christ is victory. 

And once more, what of the Word abiding in 
the young ? " The word of God abideth in you." 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 315 

In the order of the text, this comes before the 
conquest over the Evil One, and rightly ; because 
the Word in the heart stands to conquest as means 
to end. John's thought here centres in the word 
"abideth." His emphasis is on the permanent 
power of the Word over youth. This means 
more than the pleasant memory of old Bible- 
stories carried by youth from childhood. It 
means more than the transient interest in an 
eloquent sermon. It means, rather, the Word's 
mastery of the young ; the Word in the heart, no 
less than in the memory ; the Word as the law of 
the life ; the Word as the well-wielded weapon 
of moral victory, — the sword of the spirit, with 
which Christ, in the freshness of his manhood, 
met and vanquished Satan in the wilderness. 

This mastery by the Word, John assumes as a 
fact in addressing the young men : " The word of 
God abideth in you." Paul assumes the same 
thing with reference to Timothy. He calls to 
mind the unfeigned faith which dwelt in his 
mother and in his grandmother, and adds, "And 
I am persuaded that in thee also." Young people 
have, many of them, come to think that such 
mastery by the Word is impracticable. They 
think they must master the Word before they are 
mastered by it. They get hints, and sometimes 
more, of grave discussions which are going on 
over the Bible ; and they come to think of the 
study of the Bible as a labyrinth of hard questions 
which must be left to theologians, and with which 
they have nothing to do. The consequence of 



316 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

this is, that the Word gets no hold on them, even 
as they get no hold on the Word. The Bible, it is 
trne, cannot be mastered, if mastering it means 
understanding all that it contains and suggests. 
Divine truth must always have a side of mystery, 
from the very fact that it is infinite. If you and 
I could perfectly master the Bible, we should not 
need it. But if the difficulties of the Bible are a 
reason for neglecting it, they are equally a reason 
for neglecting God and Christ. We cannot find 
out God by searching, and yet we pray to this 
God whom we do not wholly know. Enough can 
be known to call out our adoring love and our 
implicit trust. We do not deny God because we 
cannot perfectly understand him. Why should 
we refuse his Word ? In science and art and phil- 
osophy, the difficulty of a subject does not repel 
youth. They study, and that intelligently, the 
works of master minds. They comprehend diffi- 
cult subjects. They work out hard problems in 
engineering and astronomy. And what I com- 
plain of in a certain class of young people is, that 
they will not apply to the Bible the same amount 
of attention and labor which they bestow on other 
things. When they meet a hard question in 
physics or mathematics, they go to their teachers, 
and discuss it : but they will read, and brood over, 
the words of infidel philosophers and lecturers ; 
they will take up the cheap, superficial objections 
against the Bible, and never examine for them- 
selves how much they are worth, or consult their 
religious teachers, who could enlighten them. 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 317 

What great book does not present difficulties? 
There has been as hot discussion over the author- 
ship of Junius' letters, as vigorous cross-firing on 
the Homeric question or the worthless epistles of 
Phalaris, as subtle criticism on Shakspeare, as there 
has been over the Pentateuch or the Gospels. And 
yet young people read Homer and Shakspeare, and 
enjoy them. Why not the Bible also ? There is 
enough in the Bible which the child can under- 
stand, enough which the youth can grasp, — fully 
enough to give it the mastery of the young life. 
Whatever mystery may attach to the Bible, the 
materials for character-building lie on its very 
surface. If there are parts of this great divine 
map which we must still mark " unknown land," 
the track to goodness and to heaven is sharply 
drawn. The wayfaring man, though a fool, need 
not err therein. It is enough for the seaman that 
his compass points to the north, even though it 
does not lead him into strange seas, which he is 
curious to explore. You may not know all the 
rich ore which lies buried in this mountain of God, 
but its duty side is out in the sunlight : the very 
children can climb it towards heaven, and gather 
fruits and flowers on its massive sides. The young 
men and strong men can move upward over its 
rocks into the pure atmosphere of the high lands, 
and see from its lofty outlooks the rich pastures 
of the kingdom of God, and the far horizons of 
divine truth. We have inspired authority that 
the young may live a clean and godly life by the 
use of God's Word : " Wherewithal shall a young 



318 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

man cleanse his way? by taking heed thereto 
according to thy word." 

You are, then, as young men and women, bound 
by your Christian profession to have the word of 
God abiding in you, as a permanent impulse and 
formative force in your character and life. It is 
for you as well as for age. You can appreciate its 
calls to faith in God and Christ, to purity of life, to 
industry, to patience, to consistency, just as well 
as I can. The Holy Spirit is as ready to make 
its precepts a living power in you as he is in me. 
It is not a question of your familiarity with theo- 
logical problems, but of your reception of plain, 
practical truths. It is indeed knowledge that is 
bound up with personal character. The Bible in- 
structs you, that it may form you. It gives you 
knowledge, that you may translate it into good- 
ness and spiritual power. If you can grapple with 
current questions of science and politics, you can 
take in the truth that there is a God, your Cre- 
ator, who claims to be remembered in the days of 
your youth ; that there is a Christ, your Saviour, 
and that you can come to him as he invited even 
the children to do ; that Christ gives the law to 
life ; that duty is better than sin ; that Christ 
points towards unselfish service. And you can 
appreciate the point of warnings, the comfort of 
promises, the inspiration of noble examples, the 
stir of calls to duty. You know, in other spheres, 
what it is to work on a principle and for a pur- 
pose ; and it is no harder to know this when the 
principle is laid down by Christ, and when the 



STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 319 

purpose is holiness and heaven. The word of God 
abideth in you. O young Christians ! can you say 
this morning that this is true of you? Has the 
Word which godly parents and teachers instilled 
into your childhood been welling up in your lives 
ever since with a fuller flood? Has that Word, 
which you promised to study and cherish when 
you confessed Christ before the church, been a 
steadily working and growing power in your life ? 
Have you kept this heavenly guest with you by 
constant questioning and communing? Has the 
power of the Word over you become stronger, 
more steady, more direct, since you began to fol- 
low Christ? 

This, which the apostle assumes of youth, is, 
therefore, to be your ideal. You ought to be, as 
young Christians, strong and victorious, under the 
mastery of God's Word; and that, not only for 
your own sakes, but for the sake of the Church 
and of the world. Vagueness, wavering in the 
character of our Christian youth, menace great 
interests of the future. You are back one or two 
ranks: you do not see what is coming, as we 
do who are at the front. We would not have 
you brought suddenly to face dangers for which 
you are unprepared, and against which the great 
defence will lie in your pure and Christ-like char- 
acter, your thorough mastery by the power of the 
Word. A few years more, and our heads will no 
longer be between you and the enemy's advance. 
We shall be down, and carried off the field ; and 
the brunt of the battle will be on you. A fight is 



320 STRENGTH IN YOUTH. 

coming on from many points. The thoughtful, 
the studious, the educated among you, will have 
to face religious and social problems which are 
daily rolling up complications. If the next age is 
to be a victorious age for the gospel, its professors 
must go into the fight with settled convictions, 
with established moral principles, with a steady en- 
thusiasm for Christ, with a faith that can remove 
mountains. Whatever your education, whatever 
your culture, you can all alike compass the apos- 
tle's ideal of godly character ; and character, quite 
as much as knowledge, is going to decide this con- 
flict. You can have the word of God abiding 
in you, and be thoroughly under its power, and 
shaped by its precepts. You can overcome the 
evil one. You can be strong, — strong in God 
and in the power of his might. May he give you 
the victory ! 



XVIII. 

GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNO- 
RANCE. 



XVIII. 

GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

" The times of ignorance therefore God overlooked ; but now 
he commandeth men that they should all everywhere repent." 
— Acts xvii. 30. 

THERE are few scenes in Scripture or else- 
where of more profound interest and mean- 
ing than that of Paul on Mars' Hill. In the 
Athenian people and civilization, the heathen in- 
tellect and the heathen faith attain their climax. 
Athens represents the very best and most that 
either of these could effect. The outcome was 
artistic beauty, false philosophy, and idolatry. 
These are now confronted with a new faith in the 
person of Paul. Standing in the public tribunal, 
surrounded by the representatives of the great 
philosophic schools, and with the beautiful objects 
of Pagan devotion on every side, he puts into one 
broad statement the representative thought of 
Pagan idolatry : " The godhead is like to gold, 
silver, and stone, graven by man's device." He 
briefly and sharply characterizes the error as a 
mark of ignorance. The stamp upon all the splen- 
did artistic paraphernalia of worship is that of 
ignorance, — the ignorance of the past perpetuated 

323 



324 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

in the present. It was a severe thing to say to 
a people who cherished the past so fondly, who 
deified its great men, that all the old worship of 
their fathers, all the dear old stories of gods and 
heroes which it was still their delight to embody 
in gold and ivory and gems and marble, were but 
marks of ignorance, — especially severe to a people 
who boasted of their culture ; and perhaps not the 
least irritating thing was the attitude in which 
Paul represented his own God — that God so new 
and strange to his hearers — towards their religious 
history and worship. He had tolerated it, over- 
looked it, as a matter which in no way concerned 
his own honor. Truly, it was not strange that 
Epicurian and Stoic sneered, and asked, "What 
will this babbler say ? " 

This is the point for our study to-day. Paul's 
words bear one, and but one, simple construction : 
that God tolerated and permitted, or, to use his own 
word, " overlooked," the follies of an ignorant and 
idolatrous age : " The times of ignorance therefore 
God overlooked." 

This raises, as you at once perceive, the very 
difficult question concerning certain things which 
God has permitted to run their course in past 
ages, — things which will not for an instant bear 
the test of even the lowest Christian morality. It 
would be the height of folly to underrate or ignore 
this difficulty. I certainly am not presumptuous 
enough to think that I can wholly resolve it. But 
we can face facts, we can grasp general principles 
of God's administration as revealed in the facts, 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 325 

and we can walk together as far as the Bible and 
history give us solid footing. And thus I think we 
shall obtain some light at least, and get upon lines 
which, though they may not carry us as far as 
we might desire, certainly bear in the right direc- 
tion. We shall never be the worse Christians or 
the worse theologians for acknowledging real diffi- 
culties when they arise. It would be the strangest 
of things if the economy of an infinite God did 
not present some real and some insoluble difficul- 
ties to the finite understanding. 

As we study the Bible history, we see two move- 
ments or currents in progress simultaneously. 
One of these we may call the natural historic 
movement ; that is to say, the progress of a his- 
tory, like that of Israel, for example, according to 
the natural laws, the ordinary physical influences 
under which nations mature, such as climate, soil, 
migration, conquest. There are those who refuse 
to see, in the history related in the Bible, any 
thing more than this. When, for instance, Abra- 
ham goes out from his country, it is merely the 
ordinary migration of a Semitic tribe beyond the 
Euphrates. The Hebrews go down into Egypt 
because of its fertility, and under the pressure of 
famine. The same results ensue as always where 
a stronger and a weaker race come into contact. 
The law of the survival of the fittest holds. The 
stronger race subdues and enslaves and oppresses 
the weaker. The natural revolt against oppression 
follows. There is another migration, and the op- 
pressed people find the way at last to Canaan. 



326 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

Then comes, naturally, a long period of confusion. 
Two hostile races are side by side, like the Normans 
and the Saxons in England. The civil polity of 
Israel is struggling to shape itself to the new condi- 
tions, and this struggle throws to the surface the 
strange characters and incidents of the Book of 
Judges. Gradually the need of an absolute head 
develops : the popular voice demands a king, and 
the monarchy is instituted. This, I repeat, is the 
only aspect of the Bible story which some will 
allow ; but another, and let us hope a larger, class 
detect another influence and another movement 
in this history ; and to them this is the controlling 
movement, the influence which gives character and 
direction to the other. That is the providential 
movement, the outworking of a divine purpose. 
In other words, the Bible is, to such readers, a 
record, not only of the great national changes of 
nations and men, but of these changes as shaped 
and guided by a superintending Providence toward 
the fulfilment of a divine purpose. Thus, where 
the philosopher sees only the migration of a tribe 
under some physical pressure, the religious histo- 
rian hears the Lord say unto Abraham, " Get thee 
out from thy kindred and from thy father's house." 
Where the one sees Abraham blindly conforming 
to the fierce Syrian ritual which bade him slay 
Isaac, the other hears God say, " Take now thy son, 
thine only son, and offer him on the mountain." 
Where the one sees only the natural uprising and 
emigration of a slave people, the other sees God 
beginning to mould a nation to preserve and trans- 
mit his truth. 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 327 

And to us, at least, the Bible ceases to have any 
special moment or meaning if this element is left 
out of it. If the Bible is not the record of God's 
saving and educating purpose in the world, if God 
is not behind and through its historic movement, 
then the Bible is unworthy of our special rever- 
ence. 

Now, our difficulty arises out of the fact that 
these two movements, the natural and the provi- 
dential, are mysteriously intertwined ; that God's 
design works itself out through much which, to an 
educated Christian sense, is cruel, selfish, and even 
brutal, and by means of men who fall below even 
the lower types of the social morality of our day. 
Certainly, if we were called on to select types of 
devout servants of God, we should not choose 
Samson nor Barak nor even Gideon. They are 
passionate, revengeful, superstitious, sometimes 
loose in morals ; and yet they are placed by a 
New-Testament apostle among the heroes of faith. 
Take, for instance, the story of Jael. She is repre- 
sented as acting under a divine impulse. She is 
praised by the prophetess Deborah as the Lord's 
deliverer of Israel ; but, after all, say what you 
will, it was a brutal thing to drive a tent-pin 
through the temple of a sleeping man. It was a 
treacherous thing to allure even an enemy with 
hospitable invitation and with promise of safety. 
Or Samson, announced as devoted to God from 
his birth, and of whom we keep reading at inter- 
vals, " The spirit of the Lord came upon him," — 
can you commend him to your children for imita- 



328 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

tion? Or, there is that horrible business of the 
Canaanites, which, in some aspects at least, must, 
I fear, continue to be a puzzle, — the divine man- 
date to exterminate man, woman, and child. These 
are terrible facts, and facts which lie in our way as 
inevitably as the crossing of the Red Sea or the 
birth of our Saviour. 

Take the matter of genealogy. Take that gene- 
alogical line which we should naturally suppose 
would have been kept absolutely pure along its 
whole length, — the line of our Lord's human 
descent. And yet it is not so. He was of the 
tribe of Judah, but you find some strange episodes 
in the history of Judah. He was of the stock of 
David; but the Book of Ruth and the Book of 
Chronicles will tell you that Salmon was the 
father of Boaz, and Matthew will tell you that 
the mother of Boaz was Rahab. 

Such illustrations — and they are but specimens 
of a great number — show us that, in the Bible, the 
natural and the providential currents do not run 
side by side like the Rhone and the Arve, where 
they issue from Lake Geneva, each preserving its 
own distinct color, but, on the contrary, mingle ; 
so that, to human eyes, God's work in history 
seems discolored by human passion and infirmity. 

Now, as I have already said, these facts involve 
difficulties ; but we can nevertheless discover, run- 
ning through the mass of facts, some straight 
tracks leading us to three general principles, which 
we will do well to have clearly in mind always 
when we read our Bibles. 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 329 

The first principle is one with which you are 
already familiar ; namely, that there is a progress 
in the divine revelation in the Bible, — a progress 
from limited to fuller revelation, from smaller to 
larger knowledge, from more contracted to ex- 
panded views of God and of truth. The Bible 
is a record of a revelation given, as we are told 
in the Epistle to the Hebrews, " at sundry times 
and in divers manners." Take, for example, the 
truth of the incarnation, the very heart of Scrip- 
ture. There is a fulness of time which must 
come before the Redeemer can be revealed ; until 
then there are foreshadowings, types, symbols, 
prophecies. Now, after Christ has come, the same 
law holds. He plainly tells the disciples that 
larger and richer developments are to come after 
him : "I have many things to say unto you, but 
ye cannot bear them now. Ye shall see greater 
things. When the Spirit is come, he shall guide 
you unto all truth." God's earlier revelation is 
confined to an individual, a family, a tribe. He 
appears as a God of the Jews, a national God. 
The idea of the Father of all mankind comes later. 
Or, take the doctrine of immortality. How imper- 
fect its revelation in the earlier Scriptures ! How 
dark and chaotic the picture of the future life 
drawn by Job ! It has no sanction in Jewish law, 
no symbol in Jewish worship : it is never appealed 
to as a motive to exertion, nor upheld as a comfort 
in trouble. What a step to the revelation of life 
and immortality in the gospel ! Or, take the mat- 
ter of spirituality in life and worship. Is there 



330 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

not a distinct progress from a religion which re- 
quired the complicated apparatus of altars, ark, 
candlesticks, curtains, incense, shew-bread, sacri- 
fices, to that which intelligently accepts the truth 
that God is a spirit? So, too, there is a progress 
from the morality which must be held in leading- 
strings, kept to duty by specific rules and minute 
precepts, to the freedom with which Christ makes 
his disciples free, throwing them upon the guid- 
ance of the conscience enlightened by his Spirit. 
All these illustrations, with a multitude more, show 
us clearly that the revelation of God and the 
unfolding of character in Scripture are as the 
progress from starlight to the brightness of noon. 

But this principle necessitates a second, — the 
principle of accommodation. We must never for- 
get that we, as Christians, read the Bible from a 
New-Testament stand-point; and that, conse- 
quently, if we read the Old Testament expecting 
to find New-Testament standards and principles 
in operation there, we shall be constantly disap- 
pointed and puzzled. As a recent writer has most 
aptly said, " We must leave our own position amid 
the worked-out results of revelation ; and we should 
divest ourselves of our Christian associations, which 
are the results of the whole educational work of 
God in history." When you read the Book of 
Judges, for instance, you cannot help saying, 
" These characters are not for my imitation. These 
deeds are not such as I ought to do. These words 
would not become my lips. How is it that men 
who say and do such things are marked as the ser- 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 331 

vants of God, and endowed with his Spirit ? Or, 
here are certain things permitted, even commanded, 
by God. They seem inconsistent with what the 
gospel teaches me to believe of his character: 
what am I to think ? " 

You cannot help thinking that there is a terrible 
inconsistency if yon do not recognize the fact of 
progress in revelation, and the consequent fact of 
the accommodation of revelation to the actual con- 
dition of mankind. You cannot make the full tide 
of the Hudson at the Tappan Zee run in the chan- 
nel of the little brook among the Adirondacks, 
though the brook may grow into the river. No 
more can you expect the full tide of Christian rev- 
elation to fit the moral conditions of Israel when 
it stood before Sinai. And therefore, as a fact, we 
find that God does adapt his mode and measure of 
revelation to men as he finds them, instead of 
miraculously fitting the men to his highest revela- 
tion. For example, take the Israelites at the Red 
Sea, and let Christ have come in the flesh, and 
have uttered the discourse in the fifteenth and six- 
teenth of John, or the Sermon on the Mount, — 
would it not have been as an idle word in their 
ears? Could they have received those sublime 
truths ? Therefore, he gave them symbols and 
rites, — the ark and the altar, the pillar of cloud 
and of fire. What was the revelation of God in 
human form but an accommodation ? Man would 
not understand God by hearing that God was a 
spirit ; and so the Infinite took upon himself the 
form of a servant. Why did he not make man by 



332 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

a miracle fit for his latest revelation? All that 
can be said is, he did not do it. For reasons of 
his own, he adapted his revelation to men as they 
were. And we ourselves stand upon the same 
basis. There is more in revelation than we have 
yet seen ; there is a glory to be revealed ; we 
might as properly ask why God does not fit us at 
once to receive the full weight of glory as it comes 
down upon a heavenly nature. We know simply 
that that is not his way ; that we could not bear 
it if it were revealed. 

But this principle goes farther. It is impossi- 
ble to deny that God gives temporary sanction to 
certain things which will not stand the test of 
Christian morality. There is polygamy, for in- 
stance. The New Testament refuses to recognize 
it. The Christian sentiment of the age abhors it. 
The civil law of the Christian community pun- 
ishes it. And yet it is among the accepted facts 
of the primitive times, and God blesses the off- 
spring of polygamous marriages, as in the case of 
Joseph. Abraham was no less the friend of God 
and the father of the faithful because he had 
Hagar as well as Sarah to wife, and Jacob was 
called a prince with God, though Rachel and Leah 
shared his conjugal affection. Slavery was incor- 
porated into the Mosaic law. God might have 
brought the ages of Deborah and of Samson up 
to the level of the Sermon on the Mount, but he 
did not. He might have worked out his purpose by 
new methods specially devised ; but he took men's 
crudity and cruelty and savage passion, — the prac- 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 333 

tice of war and all its attendant miseries, — took 
them as they were, and let these things work them- 
selves out according to their natural law, accord- 
ing to the spirit and the methods of their age. 

Christ recognized this fact clearly enough. 
When the Pharisees appealed against him to 
Moses on the question of divorce, he said, " Moses, 
because of the hardness of your hearts, suffered 
you to put away your wives : but from the begin- 
ning it was not so." That is to say, the standard 
of true marriage was fixed in the beginning in 
Eden : " Therefore shall a man cleave unto his 
wife, and they shall be one flesh." What was 
Christ's baptism by John but a temporary adapta- 
tion to crude religious conceptions? What else 
did he mean by " suffer it now " ? Or do not his 
words in the Sermon on the Mount point back to 
a similar accommodation? "Ye have heard that 
it hath been said by them of old time " — and 
those sayings were in the law too ; they were not 
mere popular proverbs: "but I say unto you" 
something different and better. Surely the pure 
utterances of God do not repeal each other. 

We have, thus far, two principles. First, that 
there is a progress in divine revelation ; second, 
that there is an accommodation in divine revela- 
tion. To these we must now add a third, without 
which the whole question would be left in worse 
confusion than before. 

The principle is this : that through this par- 
tial, growing, and accommodated revelation, Gfod is 
continually working toward his own perfect ideal. 



334 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

You can easily see, that if you once admit this 
fact of a progressive revelation, — and you cannot 
deny it, — the character of the revelation must be 
judged by its general tendency and by its outcome. 
Suppose, for example, I should give a peach-stone 
to a man who had never seen a peach, and tell 
him, that, if he would plant it, it would yield a 
delicious fruit ; and if, after a few weeks, he should 
dig it up, and, finding the seed just sprouting, 
should come jeering, and saying, " Do you call that 
a delicious thing ? " you all see what the proper 
answer would be. Back of the fruit is a process, a 
long process. Why God did not make the peach 
to spring in an instant fully ripe from the ground, 
is not the question. It is enough that he did not, 
but subjected it to the law of growth; and you 
cannot pronounce upon the meaning or the quality 
of that process until the tree is grown, and the 
fruit hangs ripe and blushing on the bough. Then 
all becomes plain. So, back of the perfect law 
and ihe perfect manhood of the gospel lies this 
slow, moral growth of humanity. You cannot un- 
derstand God's meaning in it until you see its con- 
summate result. When you once perceive that 
the Bible means Christ, that the history recorded 
in the Bible moves steadily toward Christ, then 
you may begin to understand that the imperfec- 
tion of the early time means perfection in the 
later time ; that God's toleration and accommoda- 
tion are simply parts of the process which is to 
issue in the cheerful subjection of a man in Christ 
to the perfect law of the gospel. Hence, "The 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 335 

morality of a progressive dispensation,"' as Canon 
Mozley remarks, " is not the morality with which 
it starts, but that with which it concludes." When 
you want to form a judgment of some great his- 
toric man, do you study carefully the first ten 
years of his life, marked by his crudeness, passion, 
and waj^wardness, and stop there, and decide that 
the man was a hasty, weak, passionate man ? Do 
you not rather read his life backward in the light 
of his glorious prime? Do you call his father 
weak, inconsistent, corrupt, because he bore with 
the boy's childish folly, and accommodated his 
own higher wisdom to the lad's ignorance and 
crudity? As, therefore, we study God's economy 
in the Bible history, we find that there is a con- 
tinuous upward movement in it. Toleration is 
exercised, not as a compromise with sin, but with 
a view to making toleration unnecessary. With 
all its accommodations, God's economy is never 
content to leave the man or the people in the 
condition to which it accommodates itself. It ac- 
commodates to raise. Its testimony against sin is 
clear, unvarying, trumpet-toned throughout. Its 
punishment of sin is terrible. Side by side with 
the record of the call and approval of such agents 
as Samson and Deborah, goes a faithful record of 
divine retributions. But, through all, God's pur- 
pose is clearly defined to lead men up to a higher 
level of morals and faith. The polygamic ideal 
of marriage moves upward toward the Christian 
ideal as embodied in Paul's beautiful words to 
the Ephesians. Christianity finds slavery spread 



336 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

over the Roman world ; and it does not begin a 
crusade against slavery, which would have rent 
society asunder and defeated its own ends, but 
takes Roman society as it finds it, and infuses the 
spirit of the gospel into the relation of master 
and slave : and yet Paul sends Onesimus back to 
Philemon. Gradually the great Christian truths 
of the dignity of the human soul, of the personal 
right and responsibility of the individual, of the 
law and spirit of love, are gathering force and 
leavening society. It was a little gain when it 
gained strength enough to make a law forbidding 
a slave to be crucified. It was a further gain 
when Constantine forbade the separation of the 
families of slaves. It was a further gain when 
Justinian abolished all the old restrictions of the 
Pagan laws upon manumission, and granted to 
the freed slave nearly all the privileges of the 
citizen. Im-the old city of Ravenna, lying down 
amid the marshes of the Adriatic, stands a noble 
church, built in the sixth century ; and as one 
stands amid its graceful arcades, its richly carved 
capitals, its costly slabs of Greek marble, its bla- 
zing mosaics, his mind runs down a long perspec- 
tive of history, as he remembers that this church 
was dedicated by a Roman emperor to the mem- 
ory of a slave who was buried alive for exhorting 
a brother martyr to fidelity under his tortures. 
That was a gain upon Nero's time. And so the 
leavening process went on, until, in the fourteenth 
century, slavery had ceased in Europe; and still 
on, until, in its last stronghold, the institution 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 337 

was honeycombed, and fell to pieces, and not even 
the appeal to the law of Moses could save it. 
That was just what God had meant all the while. 
Elijah was a prophet of fire, harsh and stem. None 
the less God used and honored him in his own 
generation, — yea, so much as to say, " There shall 
not be dew nor rain these years, but according to 
thy word." And yet "Christ rebuked the disciples 
who wanted to do the very same thing that Elijah 
did, — to call down fire from heaven on those who 
had insulted him. God had sent the fire at Elijah's 
call. Christ told the disciples they were of another 
dispensation, where the spirit and deeds of Elijah 
were out of place. " Ye know not what spirit ye 
are of. Ye are ignorant." The time of Elijah's 
ignorance, God had overlooked ; the Christian dis- 
ciples' ignorance, Christ rebuked and corrected; 
and yet the God of Elijah, and the Christ who 
reproved James and John, are one .nd the same. 
There is no inconsistency between the sending of 
fire and the forbidding of fire. Elijah is first 
understood, and his place fixed by the spirit and 
the deeds of Christ. There is a very significant 
passage at the close of the eleventh of Hebrews, 
in which these Old-Testament saints are ranked 
among the heroes of faith, — a passage which 
groups them all under the general law we have 
been discussing : " God having provided some 
better thing for us, that they, apart from us, should 
not be made perfect." What does this teach but 
that God's purpose in the education of men does 
not fulfil itself in any man or generation of men, 



338 GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 

but in the whole history of mankind. According 
to this, we are not to view Abraham and Moses 
and Gideon and Samson merely with reference to 
their own time, but as parts, along with ourselves, 
of God's great movement in bringing the race to 
the measure of Christ's manhood. 

But we must not leave this subject without allud- 
ing to the practical conclusion which Paul draws 
from God's forbearance in past ages : " The times 
of ignorance therefore God overlooked; but now 
He commandeth men that they should all every- 
where repent." In other words, God's tolerance 
in the past is a warning against presuming on his 
forbearance in the present. So far from being an 
encouragement to sin, it is a most pregnant warn- 
ing against sin, a most imperative call to repent- 
ance. God bore with the crudeness and ignorance 
of the men of olden time, in order that men of a 
later and more enlightened day should have no 
excuse for claiming his forbearance. A very dif- 
ferent conclusion this from that which certain men 
at the present day draw from this Old-Testament 
record, making it a ground of attack upon God's 
character, and a reason for rejecting his later reve- 
lation in Christ. As we in happier times read of 
those old days of brutal struggle, cruelty, character 
tainted with human passion, our proper sentiment 
is that of wonder at the patience of God through 
all these ages, of admiration at the wisdom of his 
forbearance, of congratulation that he has pro- 
vided some better thing for us. Let me repeat, 
that, through all these ages of patient forbear- 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 339 

ance, God's testimony is uniform, unmistakable, 
terrible against sin : and the true course of every 
man who studies this record is, to turn his face 
toward the cross ; to seek in Christ's sacrifice de- 
liverance from the power of the evil passions which 
wrote their mark so deeply on the olden times ; to 
find in Christ's character the model for the spirit 
and the deeds of the man of to-day. In the light 
which is thrown backward from the cross, Barak, 
Deborah, Samson, Jephthah, — yea, Jael with her 
cruel hammer and nail, — stand, saying to the men 
of this generation, " Repent, repent ! we acted but 
according to the light we had. That we were 
God's instruments was not the result of our virtue, 
but of his wisdom and tolerance, which used the 
agents at his hand. But you, under the light of 
the gospel, with our errors on record to warn you, 
with the example of One who knew no sin to 
beckon you to purity of life and sweetness of 
spirit, — repent ye ! the kingdom of heaven is at 
hand." 

My friends, this history is reproduced, on a 
smaller scale, in your individual life. You have 
had your times of ignorance and crudeness, your 
times of the dominion of passion ; and though you 
have had less excuse than they had, yet how your 
life has been marked by the forbearance of God ! 
How much he has overlooked and pardoned in 
every one of us ! What is the practical result of 
this forbearance in your case to-day ? Has it led 
you to a true estimate of sin ? Has it made you 
afraid of sin ? Has it led you to the Lamb of God, 



340 



GOD AND THE TIMES OF IGNORANCE. 



which taketh away the sin of the world ? or are 
those terrible words of the apostle verified in you, 
" Or despisest thou the riches of his goodness and 
forbearance and long-suffering ; not knowing that 
the goodness of God leadeth thee to repentance ? 
but after thy hardness and impenitent heart treas- 
urest up unto thyself wrath against the day of 
wrath and revelation of the righteous judgment 
of God ; who will render to every man according 
to his deeds " ? 



XIX. 

THE PKOMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 



XIX. 

THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

"And these all, having had witness borne to them through 
their faith, received not the promise, God having provided some 
better thing concerning us, that apart from us they should not 
be made perfect." — Heb. xi. 39, 40. 

THERE was a plain mechanic in a little town 
in Scotland, who feared God, and built houses 
for a livelihood. He never had more than three 
months of schooling in his life. Let us draw a 
circle round the seventy-five years of that life, and 
look at it merely by itself. Measured by the ordi- 
nary standards of the world, how cramped it is ! 
how short in its range ! how insignificant ! What 
does one builder of peasants' cottages, more or 
less, matter ? But, then, can we look at that life 
in that way? Can we look at any life in that 
way? It is plain to us all that we cannot; for 
every life everywhere establishes connections and 
creates consequences. The statement of Scripture, 
" No one of us liveth unto himself," may be said 
to be self-evident; and, therefore, no man's life- 
account can be made up at his death. It is with 
a life as it is with a large estate. It cannot be 
closed up at once upon the death of the testator. 

343 



344 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

Certain obligations have a given time to run. Cer- 
tain outstanding amounts of capital may not be 
paid in for years. Certain lands or houses cannot 
be sold until certain other persons die. And we 
all know, moreover, that an estate may depreciate 
after the testator's death. His investments may 
not turn out well in the end. Indeed, it is doubt- 
ful if the real sum total of any man's life can be 
stated until the end of all things. This humble 
mechanic, for instance, was the father of a son 
whose name is known and honored wherever the 
English language is spoken. To James Carlyle's 
narrow life in the village and in the kirk and in 
his own cottage, must be added the sum of Thomas 
Carlyle's life, and the influence of his writings, 
and the influence of the men whose thought has 
been stimulated or shaped by those writings. And 
so the son himself says, "Let me not mourn for 
my father ; let me do worthily of him : so shall he 
still live even here in me, and his worth plant 
itself honorably forth into new generations." 

I have taken this familiar illustration as con- 
taining in itself the substance of my text to-day. 
The truth it gives us is, that no man's life can be 
estimated by itself, but helps to complete the past, 
and is completed by the future. No man's life can 
be judged as an isolated unit ; it must be judged 
as part of a whole : and therefore every man is a 
debtor to the past and to the future. 

This is a peculiar text. These people — Abra- 
ham, Jacob, Moses, and the rest — were the spir- 
itual heroes of an earlier time, representing the 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 345 

nation's moral high-water mark. They were pow- 
ers, and society acknowledged and bore witness 
to their power. Yet there was a good in store, 
which, though they contributed to it, did not come 
to them. There was a promise infolded in their 
life which was not fulfilled to them, but to those 
who came after them. We should naturally say, 
that, if there were any large and healthful result to 
follow the sacrifice of home, the surrender of royal 
splendor and culture for the desert and the society 
of a slavish rabble, the dangers of the lion's den 
and of the fiery furnace, it ought to have fallen 
to the lot of those who made these sacrifices, and 
faced these dangers. But it was not so. They 
bore themselves, in these hard conditions, in such 
a way as to call forth the admiring witness of their 
time, and of later times ; but " they received not 
the promise,*' and the better thing provided was 
for those who came after them. If their life is to 
be estimated only in itself, if its record is to cover 
only the sum of its years, then this state of things 
seems unjust and cruel, and the life itself of little 
account. 

But you at once see that the writer is taking 
a far wider view than this. He is contemplating 
these early heroes, not only by themselves, but as 
links in a great succession of men of faith. He is 
viewing the results of their life as parts of the 
great development of humanity at large. What 
they received or enjoyed of ease, pleasure, or suc- 
cess is not the question ; but in what relation did 
they stand to the world's welfare ? 



346 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

Now, the recognition and acceptance of this as 
a law of life has a vast and decisive influence upon 
any man's character. It shapes a man of a differ- 
ent type from one who regards his life as an end 
to itself; and it is here set down to the credit of 
these Old-Testament heroes, as an element of their 
faith, that they apprehended this larger law, and 
lived by it ; that they put mere personal consider- 
ations out of sight, — were content to be merely 
stages, and not finalities, in the great growth of 
human history. They saw that there was a richer 
future, which they were not to share personally. 
Moses had to be content with the wilderness, and 
to forego the promised land, to which he had 
brought the people. Jacob was not to enjoy the 
brilliant future which his dying eyes saw. Joseph 
could provide only for the resting of his bones in 
Canaan : he was not to see it. And hence the 
writer says of these men, that they saw the prom- 
ises as sailors see dimly the shore of a desired and 
beautiful land, where they may not disembark. 
They " confessed that they were strangers and pil- 
grims on the earth." " Now," he continues, " they 
that say such things make it manifest that they are 
seeking after a country of their own," — a place be- 
yond this world. "Now they desire a better coun- 
try ; that is, an heavenly." In other words, all this 
matter of success and reward and happy fixedness 
is transferred to another realm. They forego these 
on earth. So far as this world is concerned, their 
life goes to minister to other lives, and is simply 
a factor in the progress of mankind as a whole. 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 347 

This is a far deeper and wider conception of 
faith than we commonly form. We are disposed 
to make faith exclusively personal, to trust God 
mostly for what he will do for us, or for those 
most closely bound to us. We say to ourselves. 
" We must trust God for daily bread, for provision 
for old age or sickness, for a place in heaven ; " 
and so we must. So Christ commands us to 
do ; but, at the same time, he teaches us to give 
faith a much wider range. Let me illustrate 
simply. You and I are citizens of this republic. 
More than twenty years ago its existence was 
menaced. War was in the land, public sentiment 
was divided, disaster was imminent. Every man 
knew what significance lay in the issue of that con- 
flict for a long future. There were two ways of 
looking at the matter. A man might consider 
simply the possible effect of the war upon his prop- 
erty, — whether his securities would be depreciated 
or not ; whether he was to be left in comfort and 
luxury, or thrown upon his daily toil for his daily 
bread, — and that view would determine his atti- 
tude towards the whole conflict. He would em- 
brace the side which promised best for himself. 
There were such men, and they met with the con- 
tempt which they deserved ; but there were other 
men, and more of them, who saw something larger 
than their own fortune. Their faith and hope and 
desire took in the whole great question of the 
nation's welfare. The dominant thought with them 
was not, " What will become of me and of my for- 
tune ? " but, " What is to become of the country ? " 



348 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

And this was the thought which made them joyful 
over victory, and despondent over defeat. This was 
what made them pour their money into the nation's 
treasury, and put themselves into the ranks. It was 
the merging of the individual man's interest in the 
interest of the State and of millions yet unborn. 
Similarly, in becoming Christians, we become citi- 
zens of heaven. If we are loyal citizens, our 
thought must include the interests of the kingdom 
of heaven : and these must be the dominant inter- 
ests, rising above all selfish considerations ; for the 
very first condition of citizenship in the kingdom 
of God is, as Christ very plainly tells us, to deny 
self. We are parts of a great divine economy, of 
a great march of ideas and character ; builders on 
a great building of God, each carving his stone, or 
laying his few courses of brick ; husbandmen in 
God's vast domain, each tilling his few acres, — one 
sowing, another reaping ; one planting, another 
watering. No man's faith is perfect which regards 
merely his own salvation ; no man's prayer is ac- 
cording to Christ's standard which leaves out, 
" Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth 
as it is in heaven." 

Thus identifying ourselves with the interests of 
God's kingdom, — the whole development of our 
race, — we find ourselves identified with a process. 
The perfect man, the perfect society, are not cre- 
ated out of hand. They have not come yet ; but 
they are slowly coming, and coming through much 
crudeness and imperfection by the way. Thus, 
then, the kingdom of God is no exception to the 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 349 

law which obtains in other kingdoms, — that 
growth involves imperfection and destruction. 
Take the law as it holds in nature. Growth comes 
through death. The corn of wheat brings forth 
fruit only as it dies. In nature's processes, we find 
much which serves merely as the step or the scaf- 
folding to something better and greater and more 
beautiful, and which, when its purpose is accom- 
plished, passes away. Where are last year's leaves ? 
They came forth in freshness and beautj^ last 
spring, as they are coming out this morning ; they 
waved and rustled through the summer heats ; 
they served their purpose of shade ; they gathered 
the influences from the atmosphere for the nurture 
of the tree, and gave them back again in moisture ; 
they sheltered the growing fruit ; and then, when 
the fruit was ripe, they faded, and fell like drop- 
ping gold through the autumn haze. They had 
done their work : they were no more needed on 
the branch. If they had a further mission, it 
must be under new forms and conditions. There 
is the worm. It crawls in the sun, and lies upon 
the leaf, and then wraps itself in the cocoon ; and 
then springs forth the butterfly in all the glory of 
gold and purple : and the worm-life and the co- 
coon-life have done their work, and have given 
that beautiful creation to the air and the flowers, 
and they pass away. 

Go higher up, into the life of man. A perfect, 
healthy child, how beautiful it is ! how winning, 
how innocent ! how natural and graceful its atti- 
tudes ! What parent has not found himself look- 



350 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

ing back to the years of infancy with a feeling 
that the years which have made his children men 
and women have robbed him of something ineffably 
sweet and precious ? Childhood is only a stage : 
so is youth, with its flush of hope, its high aims, 
its fulness and vigor of life ; and so manhood, with 
its strength and achievement. In a normally 
developed life, each stage, as it passes away, hands 
over to its successor something better and stronger. 
Does the process end with old age ? Is there not 
something better beyond the line which we call 
death ? Scripture itself breaks out into praises of 
the human body, so fearfully and wonderfully 
made ; but the charnel-house tells you what becomes 
of this divinely ingenious mechanism : " Thou 
turnest man to destruction ; and sayest, Return, ye 
children of men ; " and a new generation comes to 
the front, only to run the same round, which ends 
in the sepulchre. A wondrous waste it seems to us. 
So of society. It passes through crude condi- 
tions, which give place to higher and better condi- 
tions. There is a race which does not enjoy, and 
is not fitted to enjoy, Raphaels and Shakspeares 
and Dantes, but which plies the sword and the 
axe, — a rough-handed and rough-mannered race. 
The delicate touch of the harp-string, the cultured 
intercourse of the saloon, are for the later genera- 
tions for which these have made the standing- 
ground. One here and there, some prophet of 
his time, catches glimpses of these higher possi- 
bilities, but only sees them afar off. One life is 
spent in evolving the powers of electricity : the 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 851 

man who comes after reaps the full benefit of 
the telegraph and telephone. A Columbus dis- 
covers America : we enjoy it. 

Go still higher, into the region of religion and 
worship. The same law holds. Religion is not 
given to man full-grown. The true faith works 
its way into shape and power out of a mesh of 
false faiths. One by one these fall off, and die, 
leaving only what is essentially true to be taken 
up into the new and higher form. The history of 
religion is indeed a history of the march of eter- 
nal truths ; but it is also a history of accommoda- 
tion and temporary provision, of the breaking of 
types and the fading of shadows : " He taketh 
away the first, that he may establish the second." 
God tolerates stages of crudeness and imperfect 
moral development : " The times of ignorance 
God overlooked." He holds back from one age 
forces which come into play later. He left out, 
for instance, from earlier methods of moral train- 
ing, the stimulus and discipline which we get from 
the revelation of a future life. Why ? I do not 
know. Why did he not send Christ at once to 
Eden's gate to meet the banished inmates ? I do 
not know. I know only that all the generations 
from Abraham to David are fourteen generations, 
and from David unto the carrying away into 
Babylon are fourteen generations, and from the 
carrying away into Babylon unto Christ are four- 
teen generations. Therefore we have dark hints 
of a race of giants, of an age of brute force, out 
of which flash the sparks from Tubal Cain's ham- 



352 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

mer; and the notes of the wild "song of the 
sword" are heard, and the huge bulk of Babel 
rises through the mist. A chaos of wickedness, 
and then a chaos of tumbling waters. Then the 
patriarchal history, with the faith of Abraham, 
indeed, but with the worldliness of Lot, and the 
trickery of Jacob. Then the seething transition 
period of the judges, — Shamgar with his ox-goad, 
Jael with her hammer and tent-pin, Samson with 
his gigantic strength and grim humor and childish 
passion and gullibility, Gideon with his lamps and 
pitchers and trumpets, — and so on, down through 
the monarchy and the prophetic age. Not one 
of the men mentioned in this catalogue in the 
eleventh of Hebrews can be held up as a perfect 
model of character for the men of a Christian age. 
The New-Testament morality is higher than that 
of the old. The sabbath-school child of to-day 
has richer spiritual revelations than Abraham had. 
The humblest Christian believer has what Samuel 
and Elijah had not. 

And as to worship, we say, "God is a spirit : 
and they that worship him must worship him in 
spirit and in truth." We come to God without 
priest or victim or symbol; but what a stretch 
between our stand-point and that of the Israelite ! 
— a stretch strewn with broken types. What a 
carefully arranged ritual for the Jew ! What 
solemn charge to Moses to make all things ac- 
cording to the pattern drawn up in heaven, and 
shown him on Sinai ! What minute, specific direc- 
tions about the details of ark and altar, fringe and 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 353 

curtain, material and workmanship ! and yet only 
that all might pass away: "He taketh away the 
first, that he may establish the second." Prophet, 
priest, king, — one after another, God breaks these 
types in pieces as the fulness of time draws on, 
when Christ, the Teacher, the great High-priest, 
the Lord of lords, is to come into the world. 

We come, then, to the second truth of our text. 
Having seen the fact of imperfection, we see that 
along with the imperfection goes a promise. You 
notice the peculiar word here, "received not the 
promise." It is noted as a mark of the faith of 
these good men, that they saw a promise of some- 
thing better in the imperfection of their own age. 
Christ bears witness to this in the words, " Your 
father Abraham rejoiced to see my day ; and he 
saw it, and was glad." In like manner, Moses saw 
a nation in the rabble which went out of Egypt. 
To him the desert meant Canaan. So in nature, 
the seed, even in its falling into the ground and 
dying, utters the promise of the corn : the blossom, 
as it is borne down the wind, promises the fruit. 
Even the falling leaf, as it settles down to its new 
task, promises next spring's juices and leaves. So 
in the moral progress of our race. Paul tells us, 
that " That is not first which is spiritual, but that 
which is natural," that " The first man is of the 
earth, earthy ; " but in these he sees the promise 
of something better. "Afterwards, that which is 
spiritual. As we have borne the image of the 
earthy, we shall also bear the image of the hea- 
venly. It is sown in corruption ; it is raised in 



354 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

incorruption." Society, in its best development 
to-day, is imperfect : the ideal form of government 
is yet to be revealed ; but, as we turn over to the 
vision of John on Patmos, we see a perfect society, 
a holy city, a heavenly Jerusalem, a faultless ad- 
ministration. 

Now, the practical question for us is, what is 
our true attitude toward these two facts of imper- 
fection and promise? Our text tells us, by the 
example of these men of old. They were im- 
perfect men; they lived under imperfect condi- 
tions ; they saw a possible good which was not for 
them : but through faith they accepted the imper- 
fection, and made the best of it, and cheerfully 
gave their energy, and endured their suffering, to 
make the coming man and the coming time better 
than themselves and their time. Hence the pecul- 
iar expression of the text : " they, without us, 
should not be made perfect." Abraham, Isaac, 
Jacob, good men in then time and way, were not 
complete either in themselves or in their work. 
They went to the making of better men, like Paul 
and James and John. Nor were they completed 
in Paul and James and John. We see from this 
chapter that their work did not end with their 
death ; for they are taken up into the New-Testa- 
ment economy, and used here as examples and 
helps to the faith of New-Testament times. Nor 
will the character and work of these patriarchs 
be complete until the perfect man in Christ shall 
stand forth as the ripe fruit of the Christian cen- 
turies, — until the kingdom of Christ shall have 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 355 

come, and his will shall be done on earth as it is 
done in heaven. In that man, Abraham and Noah 
shall be made perfect. In the fully ripened social 
economy of that time, the ages of the patriarchs 
and judges and prophets shall be completed. 

We are on the same line. We and our time are 
simply a stage toward something better. With all 
our boast of high civilization, elaborated jurispru- 
dence, rich spiritual acquirement, and vast knowl- 
edge, there is something better for the men of the 
coming time. They will know more, and enjoy 
more than we do. They will be better men than 
we are. They will have greater riches of spiritual 
culture. The life of every thoughtful Christian is 
full of pain because of what is unrealized and un- 
fulfilled ; because he discerns greater possibilities 
of Christian knowledge and Christian efficiency: 
"We ourselves, who have the first fruits of the 
spirit, groan within ourselves." We are chafed by 
the hardness, the ignorance, the obtuseness, of men. 
We mourn over numberless cruelties and neglects. 
We are indignant at the corruption and trickery 
of politics. We weep in secret places over the 
coldness and apathy of the church. But the sim- 
ple question for each of us is, what are we going 
to do with it all ? What will faith do for us in 
this condition of things ? We may sit down with 
folded hands, and say, " The world is going to de- 
struction ; happiness is impossible ; perfection is 
an idle dream : and we will give ourselves up to 
the tide, and be carried down." That course will 
not mark us as men of faith. Or, we may take the 



356 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

stand-point of faith, the stand-point of the men of 
this chapter. If perfection is not for us nor for 
our time, it need not follow that perfection is 
impossible. If perfection cannot attach to any one 
age, it may come out as the resultant of all the 
ages. The question is simply this: are we will- 
ing to accept the imperfection of our own time, 
and to do our utmost and our best in it, knowing 
that we shall not reap what we sow with tears and 
toil ? knowing that the perfect man and the per- 
fect time are to come in hereafter ? 

It is a high test of faith for a man to do his best 
under temporary conditions, as a mere fraction of 
a great whole, as a mere means to the development 
of some better thing in a future which he is not 
to enjoy ; and yet that is the lesson which God's 
administration teaches us. How much care and 
skill and beauty go into merely temporary things ! 
Take a wheat-corn, that very thing which is to 
fall into the ground and die, and split it open, and 
put it under a microscope, and what a perfect 
and beautiful organism it is ! Look at that apple- 
blossom, which in a few days will be blown away 
by the wind, and what perfection of form, what 
delicacy of texture and tint ! Each one of those 
living motes which dances for an hour in the set- 
ting sunlight is finished with all the nicety of 
your own anatomy. Mature is prodigal in her 
apparent waste of beautiful and perfect things. 
So, when God gave a temporary system of worship 
to carry men over to Christ, how carefully selected 
were the types ; how stringent the insistence on 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 357 

details which seem trivial to us ! Does it not seem 
strange to us to find the Almighty giving direc- 
tions about the dimensions of the tabernacle, the 
weaving of fringes, the color of curtains, the cut- 
ting of priests' robes ? Did it matter if the taber- 
nacle or the ark or the table of shew-bread were 
a foot longer or shorter ? Did it matter if there 
were one row more or less of knops and flowers on 
a cornice or a pillar? It did matter in God's eyes. 
He would let no imperfect nor haphazard work go 
out of his hands, though it were only to serve the 
purpose of a day. Cannot we read this lesson? 
Shall we refuse our best, because our best is to be 
merged into something better? Or shall we not 
rather feel ourselves at once stimulated and 
honored by being allowed to contribute our best 
to the great result which is by and by to gather 
up into itself the best of all the ages ? 

You have read how, in the old border-wars of 
Scotland, the tidings of invasion and the summons 
to arms were carried hy the fiery cross. One run- 
ner took it, and went at full speed to a certain 
point, telling the news as he went, and then gave 
it to another, who ran on in like manner. It was 
not for the messenger to whom that summons 
came to sit down and prepare for the defence of 
his own house and the protection of his flocks 
and herds. He must take the cross, and run for 
the next stage. Brethren, the message of Christ's 
cross points us beyond ourselves and our own 
interest and our own time. It lays on us the 
charge of the coming time. It bids us do our 



358 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

best in our own time, as a means to making that 
cross the central fact of the future time. " After 
us, the deluge " was the motto of debauchers and 
sensualists, who cared only for what the present 
might yield them, and who were willing to leave 
the future to work out its problem, and struggle 
with its suffering, as best it might ; who would not 
give a thought nor lift a finger to make that prob- 
lem easier and that suffering lighter. That is no 
motto for Christians. True manhood means more 
than eating and drinking, and dying to-morrow. 
Our stage of life contains a promise for the next 
stage, that it shall be better and higher for our 
faithful toil. Our problem is, to push that promise 
nearer to its fulfilment. 

Thus, then, let us take the promise of the better 
thing info the inferior, incomplete conditions of 
to-day. Let us accept the fact of incompleteness : 
not passively nor idly. That were to exclude 
faith, and faith is the very keynote of this lesson. 
Nor, on the other hand, despairingly nor angrily. 
That were presumptuous, and useless as well. But 
let us recognize in it a promise of completeness, a 
stage towards it, and a call to promote it. No one 
of us can be more than a factor in the world's his- 
tory. The power of each factor will appear only 
when the whole column shall be cast up. The 
sum total will be greater than any factor ; but, for 
the very reason that it will include all the factors. 
"We must be slow," as one remarks, "to judge 
unfinished architecture." Truthfully said the old 
Greek poet, " The days to come are the wisest 



THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 359 

witnesses." If there be truth in that theory of 
development, so widely accepted in this day ; if we 
are living in an incomplete physical universe, no 
less than in partly developed moral and spiritual 
conditions, — that fact goes to show, that one law 
holds from the natural up to the spiritual. That 
holds out the hope that all the apparent waste in 
nature will one day be accounted for, and shown 
to be no waste : — 

" That nothing walks with aimless feet ; 
That not one life shall be destroyed, 
Or cast as rubbish to the void. 
When God hath made the pile complete. 

That not a worm is cloven in vain ; 

That not a moth, with vain desire, 

Is shrivelled in a fruitless fire, 
Or but subserves another's gain." 

That points again to the larger hope, that the 
imperfect work of true men, the imperfect teaching 
of half-taught men, the imperfect moral develop- 
ment of primitive men, and all the disappointed 
aspiration and seemingly fruitless toil and rejected 
testimony of God's workmen in all times, will be 
found again, revealed in its true value and power, 
at the unfolding of 

" That one far-off, divine event. 
To which the whole creation moves." 

It was a profound remark of a modern essayist, 
that the continual failure of eminently endowed 
men to reach the highest standard has in it some- 
thing more consoling than disheartening, and con- 



360 THE PROMISE OF INCOMPLETENESS. 

tains an " inspiring hint that it is mankind, and 
not special men, that are to be shaped at last into 
the image of God; and that the endless life of the 
generations may hope to come nearer that goal, of 
which the short-breathed three-score years and ten 
fall too unhappily short." The present, for each of 
us, bears the sign of the cross. The crown is in 
the future. The true suggestion of incomplete- 
ness now is faith and duty, not reward; sowing, 
not fruition. Only, with the cross, Christ is in the 
present; and the future shall see his own men and 
his own work complete in him. 



XX. 

ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 



XX. 

ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

"But this I say, brethren, the time is short: it remaineth, 
that both they that have wives, be as though they had none; 

" And they that weep, as though they wept not; and they that 
rejoice, as though they rejoiced not; and they that buy, as though 
they possessed not; 

"And they that use this world, as not abusing it: for the 
fashion of this world passeth away." — 1 Cor. vii. 29-31. 

THERE is no difference of opinion about that 
first statement, " The time is short." It has 
passed into a commonplace. 

But there is a difference between the admission, 
and the practical recognition, of a fact. Even in a 
case like this, it may fairly be asked, What is the 
practical bearing of our admission ? There is lit- 
tle, if any, difference here between ourselves and 
the men to whom Paul wrote. They knew that 
no long time, at the longest, remained for them on 
earth ; they believed that the old order of things 
was soon to give place to a new and different and 
better order; yet the apostle evidently thought 
that a reminder of the fact was necessary, even to 
those within the Christian circle. Evidently he 
was impressed with the fact that men were marry- 
ing and giving in marriage, weeping and rejoicing, 

363 



364 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

buying and selling and laying up possessions, as if 
the time were not short. 

And the state of things now, I repeat, is not 
materially different. Paul's warning is not super- 
fluous. Whatever men believe about the perma- 
nence of the present order of things, multitudes of 
them act as if it were permanent. 

The time, then, is short. The world, for us, is 
fast passing away. Death cannot be far off, and 
death is going to introduce us into new conditions. 
We, as Christians, profess to believe that the new 
order of things is to be better than the present 
order ; that it will clear up what is now dark ; that 
it will resolve what is now confused ; that it will 
adjust and correct what is now wrong; that it 
will rectify and explain what now seems unjust. 
Our one question is, What is our proper attitude 
towards the present temporary, brief life which 
remains to us, in view of the new and larger life 
to come? What is the practical bearing of that 
single fact of brevity upon our doing, enjoying, 
and suffering here? 

As a fact of common life, we see that the atti- 
tude of people towards a temporary and transient 
state of affairs is very different from their attitude 
towards something permanent. No man fits up 
the room at the hotel where he is to stay for a 
week or a month, as he does the home where he 
expects to pass his life. When one is waiting in 
the vestibule of a public hall where he is to hear 
some great orator, or witness some spectacle, he 
does not give much thought to the inconveniences 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 365 

of his situation. There is no place to sit down 
comfortably; the vestibule may be chilly; there 
may be a good deal of pushing and crowding, and 
he may be obliged to come in contact with dis- 
agreeable people : but he takes very little note of 
these things. The thing for which he has come is 
behind those doors ; there his seat is secured ; 
there will be warmth and light and comfort : and 
he says to himself, if he gives any thought at all 
to the matter, " The time is short. This is but for 
a few minutes ; it will soon be over ; it is not 
worth troubling myself about." When a man rides 
down from the central station in a street-car, of 
course he would rather have a seat, and the crowd- 
ing is rather annoying ; but he never thinks of 
making a serious matter of that. His object is 
to get down to business. The great interest of 
the day is in his office ; and so he holds on by the 
strap, and occupies his mind with the plans of 
the day, and dismisses all care for the temporary 
annoyance. 

We all agree that this is right, reasonable, sen- 
sible. We laugh at the man who invests temporary 
and transient conditions with the importance of 
permanent ones. But do we recognize the larger 
applications of the same principle? Suppose we 
simply enlarge the spaces a little, and set this life 
of sixty, seventy, or fourscore years over against 
the eternal life of the future. The two spaces are 
related to each other as the vestibule to the hall, 
the transit on the car to the day's business. Well, 
then, can we bring ourselves practically to recog- 



366 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 



nize this relation ; really to regard this life as the 
ante-chamber, the time of transit, the room in the 
inn where we stay until our house is prepared ? 
Can we bring ourselves to regard our real life as 
commencing only when this life shall be over ; to 
look for our real, permanent interests, for all fixed- 
ness and perfection of condition, in the life beyond ; 
and to treat the affairs of this life accordingly ? 

This is very clearly the drift of the apostle's 
words; and not only here, but all through his 
writings, one cannot read without seeing how very 
slight the hold of this life is upon him. Not that 
he has any morbid, sentimental desire to die, not 
that he is indifferent to the duties and opportuni- 
ties of this life ; but his whole mode of looking 
at it and speaking of it indicates that it is to him 
merely a preparatory stage, a period of transit. 
He is quite willing to abide in the flesh as long as 
God wills, and he proposes to occupy himself 
during that period for the furtherance of his 
brethren's faith ; but he does not hesitate to say 
plainly, that to depart and be with Christ is much 
the better thing, and that he sometimes has to 
struggle between the claims of the present duty 
and the overmastering desire to enter upon his 
new and better life. 

Now, following the order of our text, we find 
Paul bringing this idea to bear in certain special 
directions, and intimating how it ought to affect 
Christians in certain departments of their life and 
work. But, before speaking of these in detail, let 
me say, what perhaps hardly needs to be said, that 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 367 

neither here nor elsewhere does Paul, nor any 
other inspired writer, use the fact of the shortness 
of life to encourage a sense of indifference to 
life's duties. The teaching of Christ and of his 
apostles is clear and sharp, that life, however short, 
is a time of work, of duty, of ministry. If the 
world is not to be abused, it is none the less to be 
used. Short as the time is, it is long enough for 
much weeping and rejoicing ; and, because it is 
short, we are not to cultivate indifference to the 
joy and sorrow of our brethren, but rather to re- 
joice with them that rejoice, and weep with them 
that weep. Buying and selling must go on, even 
in this short space : we are none the less to be 
diligent in business because the time is short. 
There may be in the ante-chamber not a few beau- 
tiful pictures, a marble column which has blos- 
somed under the sculptor's chisel, or a fountain of 
sweet waters. These things are for us : we may 
and ought to enjoy them. Life, however short, 
has its joys and its means of giving joy. We can- 
not afford to be indifferent to its suniry side, nor 
escape our duty of making it just as sunny as we 
can. We are not excused from the courtesies of 
life, even on a street-car ; and if we can grasp the 
hand of an old friend with our unoccupied hand, 
and interchange a few hearty words, so much the 
better. The other world may be, and is, the prime 
fact ; but this world is a fact, too, though a second- 
ary one. If Paul says, " It remaineth that those 
who have wives be as though they had none," we 
are not to conclude, that, because a man expects to 



368 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

depart for heaven in a short time, he is therefore 
to treat his wife as though she were not. 

This being premised, let us now follow the 
apostle into some of the details of his application. 

" The time is short : it remaineth, that both 
they that have wives be as though they had 
none." By this we may assume that the apostle 
represents the whole class of domestic relations. 
These are the nearest and dearest of all the ties 
which bind us to earth ; these relations call out 
our deepest affections, our best energies ; they are 
the things which make life most attractive to us, 
and death hardest ; there lie the possibilities of 
our worst heart-breaks. And God himself insti- 
tuted these relations, and Christ adorned and 
beautified and sanctified them by his presence and 
first miracle at Cana ; and Paul chooses the love of 
husband and wife as a figure of the love of Christ 
for the church. Yet it remaineth, that they that 
have wives be as though they had none. 

It is very easy to see, in the light of familiar 
social facts, the side on which the apostle would 
guard us. If our earthly homes crowd out the 
attractions of the heavenly home, if we use them 
to foster our worldliness, our pride and vanity and 
self-indulgence, we are misusing them; and we 
need the apostle's caution. When that side of our 
life becomes so attractive as to shut out the fast- 
approaching life of eternity, when home tempts 
us to lounge and enjoy while life's short day is 
ringing with calls to God's work, when home 
ceases to be the nursery of consecrated power, a 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 369 

temple of worship, a training-school for Christ, a 
scene of preparation for heaven, and becomes, 
instead, a base for fashion and for shallow pleas- 
ure, — then it is time to consider the temptation 
and danger which lurk even in so holy a thing as 
domestic life, to draw aside the tapestries, and see 
how fast the sun is hastening towards the west, to 
face the hour when a voice shall call us forth from 
these beloved doors, to return no more. 

And then, too, we know that often the family 
relation is unfortunately not the earthly type of 
heaven. We know how men make it the instru- 
ment of fostering their pride of birth, and of per- 
petuating some insignificant fact of lineage ; and 
how, for the sake of preserving a family name, 
loveliness and innocence are constrained into alli- 
ance with senility and debauchery. If England's 
laureate had never written another line, he would 
have earned the eternal gratitude of every true 
soul by the brand he has left on that monstrous 
fiction of long descent, in his poem of " Aylmer's 
Field." Even more bitter is the quiet satire of 
the Psalmist : " Their inward thought is, that their 
houses shall continue forever, and their dwelling- 
places to all generations ; they call their lands 
after their own names." 

On the contrary, we find that, in the New 
Testament, domestic life is always treated with 
special reference to the life to come. The insti- 
tution of the family, beyond any human institu- 
tion, points up to God. God himself takes the 
name of the family head ; marriage is to be in 



370 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

the Lord ; children are to be trained in the nurture 
and admonition of the Lord. Domestic life is 
regarded, first of all, as a link between this short 
life and the long future ; as a means to godly 
affections, godly living, godly training, godly work- 
ing. And thus, in its Scriptural aspect, as a prepa- 
ration and not a finality, it emphasizes the words, 
" The time is short." The apostle's injunction is 
met when the home is treated as a means to holy 
and useful living here, and as a preparation for a 
better home hereafter. 

The apostle next takes up the bearing of this 
fact upon the joy and sorrow of this world : " The 
time is short. It remaineth that they who weep 
should be as though they wept not, and they that 
rejoice, as though they rejoiced not." 

Let us confine ourselves to one element of the 
world's pain and sorrow, — injustice. There is 
the fact, patent enough to the most careless, that 
multitudes of people fail to get their deserts. The 
innocent suffer ; the good do not succeed ; the bad 
prosper ; honesty and fidelity go to the wall, while 
villany rides by in triumph. It is not always so ; 
but why is it so at all? Away back in the far 
past we find Job wrestling with the question. It 
furnishes, as it always has furnished, not only a 
theological problem, but a practical problem. On 
the one hand, the reasoner asks, " How did it come 
to pass? Why is it alloy^ed?" On the other 
hand, the man who is trying to live rightly and 
to save his soul asks, "What shall I do with it? 
How shall I adjust myself to it?" 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 371 

And it is interesting to study the various an- 
swers which are given to the latter question. 
Here comes a Rousseau, who tells us it is all un- 
necessary. It is all the result of false training. 
Human nature is good ; and, if you only educate 
it properly, its good will have free play, and its 
evil will be checked, and we shall have a reign of 
peace, liberty, equality, and fraternity. You can 
read history for yourselves, and can study the 
value of Rousseau's answer by the side of the 
guillotine and in the lurid light of the French 
Revolution. 

Or, here comes the communist, saying, " Only 
do away with all private interest, and merge all 
individual right and difference in the public, and 
all will be well." Doubtless, if you could only be 
sure of universal love and disinterestedness among 
men ; but, unfortunately, the commune of Paris 
and the history of Nihilism have some significant 
stories to tell of that experiment. 

Or, there were earlier answers. There was the 
Stoic, who steeled himself against injustice, treated 
feeling as a disease, and cultivated insensibility to 
pain, anger, and pity alike. Or, there was the 
Epicurean, saying, "Yes, pain and sorrow from 
human wrong are facts; but I will evade them. 
I will keep out of all such relations with men as 
will engender injustice or cruelty. I will have no 
friendships, and therefore no misunderstandings. 
I will have no zeal, and therefore I will have no 
disappointments. I will espouse no cause, and 
therefore I will suffer no defeats. I will confer 



372 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

no obligations, and therefore I shall expose myself 
to no ingratitude. 

And now you will observe one fact, common to 
all these views, — that they are strictly bounded 
by this life. The evil, if it is to be corrected, must 
be corrected here ; and this is the real cleavage- 
line between these views and the New-Testament 
view which Paul represents in our text. 

For you perceive that the New Testament shows 
no sympathy with the sentimentalist view, that all 
that is needed to prevent injustice is proper edu- 
cation. It treats it as a necessary evil. It is a 
fact, and will be a fact so long as human society is 
not under the power of divine love. 

Further : the New Testament does not give us 
a picture of any favored man who escapes the 
world's injustice. On the contrary, it is a portrait- 
gallery of martyrs. The better its men, the more 
they suffer at the world's hands. Christ gathers 
up into himself all virtues and perfections; and 
the cross is the world's practical comment upon 
the man in whom no fault could be found. His 
name, given by prophecy, and countersigned by 
his life, is " Man of sorrows." His great service 
to the world is through crucifixion. 

And the New Testament, moreover, gives us no 
men of iron, insensible to suffering. The victims 
of the world's cruelty are real sufferers . If the 
New Testament is full of the triumph over pain, 
it is equally full of the human sense of pain. The 
perfect Man shows us his natural recoil from suf- 
fering when he says, "Save me from this hour," 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 373 

and, " If it be possible, let this cup pass from me." 
Paul is no stoic, but thoroughly a man in his keen 
sense of cruelty and wrong. He never affects any 
other sentiment. His body is a body of humilia- 
tion, — a tent, flapping and straining in the winds 
of time, which he will be only too glad to have 
taken down, so that he can break camp, and go to 
the fair city where Christ is. 

Once more : the New Testament puts every 
Christian in a positive attitude towards this fact. 
He cannot ignore it ; he cannot evade it ; he must 
feel it ; and he must feel towards it in the right 
way : and that way is not to live under protest, 
and let the world's injustice eat all the sweetness 
out of life. There are people who have gotten 
to brooding over the misery and inequality and 
cruelty of this life until they are literally filled 
with cursing. The world will not take them at 
their own value : therefore they hate the world. 
The world deals unjustly by them and theirs : they 
stand aloof from the world. They see certain 
things wrong in the church ; they mutter in secret 
places, and can see no good in the church : all is 
formalism and hypocrisy. You find no warrant 
for any thing of this kind in the New Testament : 
you find the true bearing of a Son of God towards 
the world's evil summed up in our Saviour's words, 
"Resist not evil." This is really the essence of 
this part of our text : " They that weep ; they that 
feel keenly the world's cruelty and sorrow, as if 
they wept not : " not acting as though all of life 
consisted hi the world's being just and kindly to 



374 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

them, as if to live were only not to weep ; not wast- 
ing time in idle lamentation or impotent scolding ; 
not consuming themselves in the effort to prove to 
the world how great or how good they are : but, 
on the contrary, feeling that it is far more impor- 
tant to be right than to be thought right ; far more 
important to be sweet and loving and tolerant, 
and cheerfully busy about God's work, than that 
the world should give them their due. 

Look at Paul's words about love. They imply 
throughout an element of evil and injustice upon 
which it is to exert itself. In that thirteenth 
chapter of First Corinthians, the very keynote is 
struck by Christ's words : " If ye love them that 
love you, what thank have ye ? " It is against ha- 
tred, evil, injustice, that the quality of love proves 
itself. " Beareth all things : " love, the best thing 
in this world or in heaven, is none too good for a 
burden-bearer, — nay, bears the heaviest burdens of 
all. "Believeth all things:" love, which is most 
wounded by faithlessness and treachery, is the last 
to lose faith in humanity. "Hopeth all things: " 
love is set hopefully over against the multitude 
of facts in man, and in society, which tempt to 
hopelessness. And so with the rest. The very 
principle of the divine life, love, most warmed by 
sympathy, most sensitive to coldness and injustice, 
most deeply cut by cruelty, is the very principle 
which is not provoked, and which thinketh no 
evil, and which never faileth. You find the same 
thought underlying Paul's words in the Epistle to 
the Romans about "the powers that be." How 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 375 

kind and just those powers were he knew who had 
felt the scourge at Philippi, and had known the 
horrors of the inner prison ; yet, " Let every soul 
be subject under the higher powers. Servants, 
obey your masters according to the flesh." And so 
Peter : " It is thankworthy if a man, for conscience' 
sake, endure grief, suffering wrongfully ; " for Christ, 
our great example, suffered not only from the un- 
just, but for the unjust, esteeming his suffering of 
little account if he might but bring us to God. 

Now, all this is the purest sentimental nonsense 
if this life ends all things. If the wheat and the 
tares are to grow together, and no separation is to 
be made ; if love is to hope and bear, and no time 
is to come when that which is in part shall be 
done away, — let us eat and drink and resist evil, 
and assert ourselves; for to-morrow we die, and 
are as the beasts. But if, as the gospel every- 
where assumes, this state of things is passing away, 
to give place to a larger and better and more per- 
manent one, then let the injustice and cruelty and 
sorrow be measured by the proportions of that 
larger life. They seem to be much in themselves ; 
but Paul puts the proportion for us in one of his 
graphic sayings : " This light affliction, which is 
but for a moment, worketh out a far more exceed- 
ing and eternal weight of glory." The only diffi- 
culty with Paul's statement is on the side of the 
glory. It is so great and transcendent that it will 
not go into any formula that even he can devise. 
But even the statement which he does give makes 
the sorrow and trial of earth look very small. 



376 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 



Suppose we must be sorrowful to the end of time, 
— and many a man and woman has to face that 
necessity, — there is something else in life besides 
our sorrow. We can be as though we wept not ; 
that is to say, we can be as useful and as helpful 
and as kindly and as sympathizing and as busy 
as if we had no cause to weep. We may have 
lost what was ours; but the time is short, and 
heaven will give it back with interest. Hard 
words, unkindness, neglect, — we all get our share ; 
yet we need not be made thereby hard or bitter 
or neglectful. We may be to the world, in our 
spirit and ministry, just as if these things were 
not. The time is short. The day is coming when 
Christ's children shall pass into a realm of perfect 
love, where no unkindness shall ever make the 
cheek flush, and no ingratitude ever wound the 
spirit. 

And so of our joys : " They that rejoice, as 
though they rejoiced not." Not that we are to 
pass this life in gloom and sullenness because it is 
short, and another life is coming. When the train 
goes through the tunnel, the lamps are kindled, 
and the carriages made as bright and cheerful as 
possible. We shall not sit down, and resign our- 
selves to gloom, and go to sleep if we can. No. 
The time is short. Let us be cheerful, — all the 
more cheerful because the sunlight will pour in by 
and by. But if there is grander, richer, more en- 
during joy in the life beyond this, it is not the part 
of wisdom to be too much absorbed in earthly joy. 
When a boy is going on his first journey to the 



ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 377 

city, which has been in his mind the sum and ideal 
of all splendors, you may find him playing his 
game of marbles or ball an hour before the train 
starts, but not with the same abandonment which 
marks him on the ordinary school holiday, when he 
has nothing to do but play. He plays as one who 
is ready to drop the bat at a minute's notice, and 
go upon his journey, to enjoy his greater pleasure : 
and so the comparison of the familiar hymn is not 
extravagant : — 

" This life's a dream, an empty show ; 
But the bright world to which I go 
Hath joys substantial and sincere." 

You can easily follow out for yourselves the appli- 
cations of the thought to the buying and selling, 
the possessing and use of the world in general. 
All these things, in New-Testament thought, have 
their value determined by two facts, — the short- 
ness of this life, and the overshadowing, transcend- 
ent grandeur of the life to come. Does it not 
become us to hold this world lightly in view of 
these two truths, — so little time left, and eternity 
approaching? Does it not become us to guard 
ourselves against being too much absorbed in 
business, too much engrossed by pleasure, too 
much fretted and irritated by the trouble and 
sorrow and injustice of this life ? Such things do 
not become those who are passing through this 
temporary stage to an eternal home. An old 
woman sat one day beside her apple-stand in a 
great thoroughfare. A well-known judge walked 



378 ONLY A LITTLE WHILE. 

up, and stopped for an apple. " Well, Molly," 
said he, " don't you get tired of sitting here these 
cold, dismal days ? " — " It's only a little while, 
sir," was the answer. — " And the hot, dusty days ? " 
— " Only a little while, sir." — " And the rainy, 
drizzly days, and your sick, rheumatic days ? " — 
" It's only a little while, sir." — " And what then, 
Molly ? " — " Then, sir, I shall enter into that rest 
which remains for the people of God; and the 
troublesomeness of the way there don't pester nor 
fret me. It's only a little while." — " But," said 
the judge, " what makes you so sure, Molly ? " — 
" How can I help being sure, since Christ is the 
way, and I am his ? Now I only feel him along the 
way : I shall see him as he is in a little while, 
sir." — " Ah ! " said the judge, " you've got more 
than the law ever taught me." — " Yes, sir, because 
I went to the gospel." — "Well," said he, as he took 
up his apple, and began to walk off, " I must look 
into these things." — " There's only a little while, 
sir." My whole sermon is in that story. 



